


Illusory Knight

by Raven_Ehtar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (all self-aimed and it calms down), Ableist Language, Alternate Universe, Crying Dean Winchester, Depression, Gen, Post-Season/Series 07, Self-Hatred, Song Inspired, Suicidal Thoughts, Welcome to Reality AU, depressing author writes about depressing things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-12 22:29:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15350136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raven_Ehtar/pseuds/Raven_Ehtar
Summary: The life of a hunter was no kind of life any sort of sane person would want. Soaked in blood and terror and no chance of enjoying those things which most people took for granted, who would want that nightmare? Certainly Dean had often thought that he would give it all up if given half the chance. Walk away from the life and settle down into the ordinary kind of routine most everyone complained about because they didn't know any better.But then he woke up, and it turns outhedidn't know any better, either. He was really only trading one nightmare for another.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I wrote quite a while ago, back when I was still pretty solidly a part of the Supernatural fandom. It’s been sitting in various forms and levels of completeness for literally years, and because of that I actually questioned whether or not I wanted to publish it. In the end I decided that I’ve sunk way too many hours into it to _not_ post it. So here we go with some old writing!
> 
> There will be several medical impossibilities/inaccuracies. Most major of these will be someone waking up after a several decade long coma. We’re acknowledging the impossibility while at the same time ignoring it. Because.
> 
> Historian’s Note: Technically where we are in the series doesn’t matter, but somewhere between seasons 7 and 8.
> 
> Music: Supernatural by Cowboy Junkies

For a minute, Dean thought he was dreaming. It felt like he was dreaming, or stuck in the paralysis between waking and dreaming. He’d had the experience often enough to be familiar with it. It was hard to breathe, and what he was able to drag in was heavy and wrong, only making him feel worse, not better. None of his limbs wanted to work, they all felt heavy as lead. His legs refused to move at all, it was like they were pinned in place, and his arms were only marginally more cooperative. 

Overwhelming the physical sensations, though, was the intense need to _get away, get up,_ break the surface of whatever pool or lake or sea he had fallen into and _breathe_ before he really did drown. 

He came awake gasping, and then choking. He opened his eyes, but had to close them again. The world was blindingly bright, even worse than when he’d dragged himself out of his own grave. So he choked and spluttered with his eyes squeezed shut, feeling like he was about to puke. Wherever he was, he was flat out on his back, and that only seemed to be making everything worse. He tried rolling onto his side, but discovered that he couldn’t. The same heaviness he had felt while coming awake was still affecting him. His limbs trembled with effort, but did not, _could not_ obey, they were too weak. Shocked, Dean realized that even the effort of coughing, and then of trying to roll onto his side had absolutely exhausted him. 

What the hell was wrong with him? Where was he? Where was Sammy?

The coughing finally passed, leaving Dean trembling, feeling sick and more tired than he would have believed possible. His throat was raw and dry, and when he tried to breathe in through his nose, something obstructed him. 

Slowly, Dean tried to open his eyes again. He had to find out where he was, figure out what had happened and how much danger he was in. The fact that he was in danger wasn’t even a question, he just needed to know how much.

The light stabbed at his eyes again, making them water. Dean grit his teeth and squinted, blinked, anything but shut his eyes again. He had to see. Tears streamed down his face, and a headache began to bloom dead center between his brows, but he still dragged his eyes open, millimeter by millimeter.

The glare of light and the blur of tears made everything an indistinct blob, but it was something, something more than the dark blank offered by the inside of his eyelids. Though, admittedly, it wasn’t much more. With his eyes closed it was blank darkness he stared at. With them open it was blank whiteness. It was blindingly white, and until his vision slowly, _slowly,_ came into focus, it was featureless as well. Slowly, Dean could make out vague variations of white, crisscrossed with straight, regular lines that intersected each other. 

A paneled ceiling, he realized. Complete with a small, brownish water stain in one corner. 

Well, he _was_ laying flat on his back. Apparently he was also inside someplace which was clean and in good repair, at least by his usual standards.

He turned his head to the right. It was much easier than trying to lift his arm or move his leg, but then, gravity was doing most of the work for his head. 

Vague shapes made a confusing jumble, until they eventually resolved into a bedside table set with a variety of objects. A clock radio with a green digital readout, a plastic pitcher and a glass, a squat, white vase for flowers - empty - and a white, old fashioned phone. It could have been the setup for just about any hotel across the country, and the room beyond didn’t give him any more clues. Or at least what little he could see, as his eyes still refused to fully function. He could tell the walls were plain and white, and if the floor had any kind of pattern Dean couldn’t make it out, but it was pale as well. There was no other bed beside his, and on the far wall he thought he could see the outline of a door.

All in all, fairly unhelpful. Whatever crap motel he and Sammy had landed in this time, so far it got nine out of ten stars for cleanliness, but minus three for the décor. It was like looking at the inside of an igloo.

Dean tried turning his head back to the left to see the rest of the room. Looking left was decidedly more of a problem than turning to the right. Now he was fighting gravity rather than having it help him out. When he finally managed it his headache had sharpened to a point stabbing him between the eyes, a thousand smaller aches, pains and itches had made themselves known all over his body, and a definite sense of panic was beginning to set in. Where the hell was he, and why couldn’t he move properly?

The left side of the room was much brighter, making him squint again. The reason was immediately obvious - there was a bright square in the center of the wall. A window. 

After what felt like an eternity of waiting for his eyes to readjust to the brighter light, fresh tears cutting new tracks through the old, he realized that the window was actually covered with thick drapes. The light that was coming in and felt like it was trying to melt his eyeballs out of his skull was really quite diffuse and dim. He’d had so much trouble just from that?

The left side of the room, when he could make it out through the glare of muffled sunlight, was as stark and plain as the right. White walls, the only concession to decoration being a wrought metal crucifix nailed beside the window, the drapes themselves white, and plain flooring, which he thought was linoleum tiling. There still was no second bed. He was the only one in the room, unless there was another bed in the direction of his feet, but there was no way in hell he was going to manage sitting up to see. There was, however, something Dean had oft seen before, and which went some way to explaining where he was, if not why. Banks of monitoring equipment and graphs, IV bags on stands, and a veritable tangle of tubes and wires leading from it all and into Dean’s bed. Into Dean in some cases. 

He was in a hospital - again - and they had him hooked up like a man on life support. Hell, for all he knew, he was on life support. 

The panic that he’d been fighting off from the first moment of waking was beginning to win the fight and gain hold over Dean’s mind. He was in a hospital and he didn’t know why. He tried to remember the last few days, track down anything in his memory that would have led him to a hospital bed… but everything was hazy, especially anything recent. The more he tried to hold on to the memories, the more they crumbled away in his fingers, like chalk. There had been a job - there was always a job - but what had it been? Was it something to do with Dick and the Levis… or had that all been months ago? He couldn’t quite remember. 

That only made him panic more. Why couldn’t he remember, how much of his memory was he really missing? Why couldn’t he move, was he paralyzed? 

Doing his best to breathe evenly, Dean tried to move his hand. It wasn’t an attempt to move it _to_ anywhere, just to move, to wiggle a finger, to prove that it was even still _capable_ of movement. When he felt his fingers twitch, and then slowly begin to curl closed, Dean gasped a relieved breath. Then, feeling like Uma Thurmin from _Kill Bill,_ he ordered his toes to do the same. It took more time than his fingers, but eventually he felt the roughness of the bed sheets scrape over his skin, and he fell back in relief. Or he would have, if he hadn’t already been laying down. 

Good. He wasn’t paralyzed. Why was he so weak, then? Why was he here and how long had he been in this bed? It felt like it had been a long, long time.

_Where was Sammy?_

The rising panic took on a much sharper edge, and he was suddenly consumed with the need for his brother. He had to see Sammy, he _had_ to. Whatever had happened that had landed him here, hooked up to more machines than the bionic man, Dean couldn’t remember, but he knew, he felt in his gut that Sammy was in danger. Something terrible had happened, and he _had_ to protect his baby brother.

He tried to shout for a nurse, but his throat was so dry that it only sent him into a fresh coughing fit, his abdominals and his back screaming at him from the strain. When they finally began to subside, Dean became aware of two things at the same time: The machines he was tethered to had begun bleeping like mad, and there were now two nurses in the room with him, talking quietly but excitedly to him and to each other.

“Okay, okay, calm now,” one nurse, a girl with red hair and blue scrubs was right beside him, patting his shoulder and speaking softly. Then a grin spread over her face, and she seemed to forget for a second that he was even there. “Oh my god,” she breathed. “I don’t believe it, _I don’t believe it._ Theo! He’s awake, he’s actually awake! Can you believe it?”

The second nurse, a guy whose name Dean assumed was Theo, was beside the monitors and IV’s, checking everything over with a more controlled expression of shocked wonder than the girl. He wore the same blue scrubs, a nametag pinned to one breast, and sported a neat haircut and goatee. He looked at Dean, who was still trying to draw an even breath, and shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice low as well. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this happening, except that one fireman. But that was a much shorter case than this…”

“Yes! But here he is, aren’t you?” The girl turned back to Dean, her tone going very soft and… like she was talking to a kid, almost. “You’re back with us, now.”

Dean panted, frowning at the female nurse. Something was off about all of this, but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was. He tried to speak again, his lips feeling thick and almost numb as he tried to shape them around the words.

The nurse saw him trying to speak and shushed him. When he’d subsided she turned to the bedside table. Dean heard water sloshing, then she came back with the glass half full. She looked up at the second nurse. “Help me sit him up, Theo.”

It was uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than Dean would have thought possible, just having a couple of arms slipped behind his back and then lifted into a half sitting position. Both nurses had an arm around him, and Dean had no trouble at all in telling that if they took their support away he would collapse straight back into the mattress, with no hope at all of catching himself with his own strength. The girl helped him to sip the water, his own arms laying unresponsive and useless by his sides. It was hard to even swallow, but the nurse was careful, making sure he didn’t choke.

“There we go, sweetie, nice and slow. There we go. Everything’s all right, don’t you worry,” she babbled off a continuous stream of supposedly comforting chatter. Dean was about ready to decide she was a pediatric nurse moonlighting on the main halls, or wherever he was, except that Theo was acting much the same, murmuring his own, “Good job, buddy, nice and easy,” whenever the girl lapsed. 

Dean was thirsty, but he couldn’t finish off even half a glass of water. When he began to slow, the nurses helped him back down again. He didn’t have to go as far back as he came up, as one of them had adjusted the bed so its top portion was at an incline. 

“Take it easy, now. You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

“Do you remember your name?” Theo asked, scrutinizing his face. “Or where you are?”

Dean frowned. He cleared his throat. The water had done wonders for making it feel like he could function. When he spoke, though, his voice was strange. Incredibly weak and raspy, even weedy. “Dean Winchester,” he said, erring on the side of honesty. He didn’t know if he was using an alias here, or which one if he were. “I don’t know… where I am,” he admitted. He looked at the doors, half expecting a six foot four inch frame to come busting in. “Where’s Sammy?” He’d meant to say ‘Sam,’ but ‘Sammy’ popped out first.

Theo frowned and looked over at the woman. “Do you know who he means, Cate?”

The girl - Cate - was frowning as well, brows drawn together in a pout Dean might have considered cute at any other time. Now it just made the fluttering moths of panic around his heart pick up again. Then her face cleared, her eyes lighting up as she struck on a recollection. “Yes, I think so. I remember there was a ‘Sam’ mentioned in his admittance history.” She focused on Dean again, and her voice went slightly higher when she spoke to him, like she was talking to a baby or a dog. Dean tried not to bristle. “Do you mean your baby brother, Dean? Is that who you mean?”

_‘Baby’ brother?_ Dean wondered. _Admittance history?_ His voice still not trustworthy enough to make it through a complete sentence, Dean nodded, barely. Verbal _and_ nonverbal forms of communication were going to be a bitch. Just nodding his head was nearly impossible.

He heard Theo take a small step away from the monitors. “His brother? Wasn’t he-?”

“I think,” Cate interrupted quickly, “that we should let Dr. Waters know that our sleeping Prince is awake, first. Then we can notify family.”

Theo bit at his lips, and the look he leveled at Dean made the dark shadow of foreboding well up and threaten to engulf him. It was a pitying look, shot through with worry or apprehension. He was afraid. This nurse was afraid of Dean learning something about his brother. 

Something had happened to Sammy.

“Where - is he?” Dean managed to bite out, the edge of panic unmistakable in his voice, and only confirmed as the monitors attached to him registered his heart rate and blood pressure. “Where’s Sam?”

“Dean, you need to calm down,” Cate’s tone lost some of its patronization and took on a firmer edge as she laid a hand on his wrist. As though he could even move. But her hand felt strange, wrong. He tried looking down at his own arm to see why. It seemed so far away, he had to squint to focus properly…

“It’ll be alright, Dean. We’ll call your father and he’ll explain everything, okay?”

At first the words didn’t register. He was too busy staring at Cate’s hand, and his hand and arm beneath hers. At first, even that was failing to register. It was his hand, his arm… it had to be. He could feel the weight and warmth of Cate’s hand, the softness of her skin, the cold little shock from where her silver watch brushed against him. It _had_ to be him… but it couldn’t be. There was no way that the thin, wasted limb he saw laying in the sheets was his. Gone was the healthy color of the skin, the fullness of flesh and muscle. What he saw was little more than a set of bones wrapped in paper white skin. Even the skin looked delicate and fragile, like it would tear if he stared at himself too hard. That was _his_ hand and arm? If he struggled and tried to move, that was what would eventually obey his commands? And if that’s what his arm looked like… what about the rest of him? Was he a walking skeleton now?

Then, his brain still refusing to accept what he was seeing, the words Cate said clicked into place. He stared at her, and he dreaded to think what his expression was like if hers was a response to it. _“My father?”_ he croaked.

—•—

Dean had lived through a lot in his lifetime. He’d seen and done things that would send most people to the loony bin or off the edge of a cliff, and he had come out of the other side more or less intact. Not without a good collection of scars, physical and psychological, but he’d always come through as himself and ready for more. He was a hunter. He knew how to take the hits and give back just as bad as he got. He could take on vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, and the freaking soldiers of God Almighty and leave them all hurting.

Yet when the nurses, in their light blue scrubs and laminated nametags announced that his father was there to see him, his heart felt like it dropped straight into his bladder. 

First, the nurses had to wake him up to tell him anything. After his initial waking and a quick check up by Dr. Waters - a middle aged man with grizzled hair and a build he would have expected on a logger rather than a doctor - he’d been so exhausted that he’d fallen asleep even as someone was talking to him. He’d felt it creeping up on him, and that had frightened him as well. What if he couldn’t wake up again? He’d wanted to fight it off, to stay awake as long as he could… but he might as well have been trying to stop a train by standing in front of it. He went out like a light as Theo was assuring him that he _would_ wake up again, and that he personally would make sure there was good food waiting for him when he did. It wasn’t terribly reassuring when it was coming from the guy who couldn’t even believe he’d woken up the first frigging time. 

Unconsciousness had rolled straight over the top of him as he struggled against it. The next thing he knew, Cate was gently waking him, telling him his father was there and ready to see him.

His father, John Winchester. The man he’d worshipped all his life, had done his level best to obey, gratify and to emulate. The man who’d raised him into the life of a hunter, he and Sammy both, who had done so much to hunt down the Yellow-Eyed Demon who’d killed Mary Winchester. The one whom Dean had slowly come to terms with as a completely obsessed and self-absorbed asshole, dragging his sons into a life of terror and blood when that was his own fight to win or lose. He owed everything to the man, it was true… but then again, it wasn’t. Not quite _everything_ was owed to him. John Winchester wasn’t entitled to Dean’s life or his freedom, father or not.

His father was _dead._ There was no doubt in Dean’s mind about that. John was well and truly dead. He’d sold his soul for Dean’s life, spent more than one hundred years of subjective time in Hell, being tortured by Alistair before escaping through a Hell’s Gate in Montana. From there, Dean had no idea where the soul of Daddy Winchester had gone. But one place it was _not_ was back in its own meat suit. 

John Winchester was dead. 

And yet, here he was, standing in the doorway of Dean’s stark hospital room, barely acknowledging Cate as she saw herself out, smiling between the two of them. His eyes, full of wonder, disbelief and tears, were fixed on Dean. As he reached for the light switch, then dropped his hand before he could flip it, he refused to look away from his son’s face. He half stumbled, half jogged across the clean, white linoleum of Dean’s floor to his bedside, his eyes never straying. His mouth worked, now smiling, now scowling while trying to hold back tears, now trying to speak, and now laughing or possibly sobbing. He reached Dean’s side, and for awhile he just stared down at him, the tears of his eyes finally brimming over. Then he reached with one of his thick, square hands, and lay it gently over Dean’s, just as Cate had done earlier. Now, just as then, Dean was overwhelmed with a sense of just how _wrong_ it felt, how small and weak he felt compared to the hand touching him, and he wished he had the strength to actually pull away from the touch.

But at the same time, it made his father suddenly very real. Like Cate, John’s hand conveyed warmth and weight and solidarity. Unlike Cate’s, John’s hand was rough with calluses, much heavier, and made Dean think the fingers wanted to grip his possessively, but dared not to. They shook, his father’s fingers. His whole hand and arm shook from the same hurricane of emotion that waged war on his face. 

The touch transformed John Winchester from an impossible vision to a solid, flash and blood man. The same flesh and blood man Dean could remember swinging him around as a kid, reading him bedtime stories, and teaching him how to fire a sawed off shotgun.

Dean felt tears well up in his own eyes, and soon they were both crying. 

His dad came down to his level, folding into the chair that had been left beside his bed, and just stared at Dean, tears running freely down his face. He didn’t speak, didn’t seem able to, but just held on to Dean’s wrist. He could tell his father wanted to do more by the way his fingers would convulsively grip at him and then immediately let go again. It was like he was afraid of breaking Dean if he gave into impulse and held him… but, remembering how bird-fragile just his arm looked, he just might.

Even without being choked up at the sight of his father, Dean doubted he would have been able to speak. He’d learned while trying to communicate with Cate and Theo that his voice was untrustworthy and failed him on even short sentences. With John remaining equally silent, it gave Dean some time to really look at him. 

It was definitely his father. The same eyes, the same mouth, even the way his eyes crinkled at their corners when he grinned were all exactly his father, the ex-Navy SEAL. At the same time, there was something just slightly off about him, something that made Dean stare hard, trying to place what it was. It was like a picture frame being slightly askew on a wall, something subtle that threw off the whole image, but hard to pinpoint. Finally, he got it. 

His father looked _older._ He was clean shaven - and when was the last time that had happened? - but he looked older than Dean ever remembered seeing him. There were crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes when they weren’t crinkled in smiles, as well as fine lines around his mouth. His whole face was slightly heavier, not as toned as it had been, and Dean realized with a jolt that his whole frame was bulkier than he remembered. John Winchester had never been a slender man, but he had always been active. This body was edging along to doughy. There were other subtle signs Dean could see, now that he knew what to look for: the circles beneath the eyes, the darker, more leathery look of his skin, the silver shot thickly through his hair. It was all understated, but all added up to remind Dean of one very important fact:

This was not, _could_ not be John Winchester. John Winchester was dead, salted and burned, given a proper hunter’s funeral. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t his father, but something trying to convince him that it was. Why it would choose to look older than John would be, when it had gotten every other detail right was beyond Dean. Maybe there was some reason for it, or maybe it was just a stupid mistake. 

Either way, it helped to bring Dean back to his senses. His tears began to dry up, and he was almost glad he couldn’t move. Otherwise he would have flung the imposter’s hand off of him and given away the game. 

John - whatever it was that wore John’s face - didn’t seem to notice the change in his ‘son.’ He still cried crocodile tears and stared at Dean with disbelieving eyes. Even though he had seen through the thing’s deception, Dean found that it was still hard to feel completely detached. It certainly _felt_ like his dad… he had to stay firm, figure out what was going on, and get out of here. Find Sammy and get out of here. 

“Dean,” his dad finally spoke, his voice a croak Dean barely recognized. 

_Nice cover,_ he thought. _Using the crying to disguise his voice._

The hand on his wrist did another one of its little spasms, squeezing and releasing, tight but quick. Dean winced, and John let go guiltily. “It’s good to see you boy, awake at last… I wasn’t sure I would ever…” he trialed away, and then laughed, wiping at his eyes with the back of one hand. “The docs, they say it’s a miracle you opened your eyes after all this time. Never seen anything like it. Say it must be a miracle…”

There were a lot of things Dean wanted to say on the subject of miracles and how likely they were to occur without exacting some sort of price down the line, but he was limited both by how much his body would allow and by how the creature would react. What was this thing, and what did it want? Dean was near enough paralyzed, what was the point of trying to win his trust? Still, he could play the game for awhile, see how much this thing would be willing to give him…

He cleared his throat, licked his lips, and tried to form the words. Like before, the first try produced nothing more than a pathetic croak and wheeze. The John thing quieted, waiting and listening carefully for his next attempt. It took a lot more concentration and effort than just speaking should ever require, but he finally got out the two words he wanted. “What… happened?”

For a moment John looked blank, completely nonplussed by the question. Then he sighed, or let out a heavy breath he’d been holding. With one of his large, callused hands, he rubbed at the back of his head. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t remember. You took a bad knock, it was bound to mess some things up…” He stared into the middle distance for a moment or two, and Dean let him, not having much in the way of choice on the matter. “You’ve… been asleep for a very long time, Dean. You got hurt real bad, and been here in this hospital ever since…”

Something of the panic Dean had felt before abruptly began to reassert itself as the thing spoke. He had vague idea of where this creature was leading, and he didn’t want to hear any more. He didn’t even want to think of it, to bring the idea into any sharper focus them it was now. He didn’t want to hear it, lie that it would be, for fear that he might begin to believe it. 

With what felt like a Herculean effort, Dean threw his head to the other side, away from the image of his father that wasn’t really his father and stared instead at the white wall and the square, diffuse light that made his eyes water. “No,” he managed to get out between clenched teeth. “No. No.” Each time he got the word out it cost him, he could hear the monitors, still attached to him with their webs of wires, pick up his distress with little alarmed beeps. He couldn’t keep from saying it, either. Anything to keep from hearing what this thing had to say.

“Dean,” the John-thing said, sounding hurt, confused. Then, after a moment of silence, he heard footsteps coming around to the other side of the bed, the side Dean could now see. “Dean, I know this is hard, but you have to know what happened…”

He tried to shake his head, failed. “All fake,” he managed after two tries. “Trick,” he said. 

It had to be a trick, a hallucination of some kind. All of it, from his father, his own wasted body, the nurses… He’d been a victim of some pretty elaborate illusions before, and this was just another one. A much more convincing one. It wasn’t real, none of it, and there was no reason why he should believe a single word from this thing that was wearing John Winchester’s face.

“Where?”

The question slipped out before Dean could stop it. John licked at chapped lips, his tongue blood red against his weathered face. 

“At the hospital, Dean. Dean,” he reached for him, his heavy hand settling on Dean’s thin shoulder. The _realness_ of John in that moment threatened to overwhelm him. He was warm, he had weight, and for this moment he was the only thing real in the room. He was the only thing which possessed color in a room of white, and Dean felt himself _believe,_ despite all he had ever been through before in his life. 

He freaked out. In his weakened state, it hardly amounted to anything. All of the struggle and fight he could manage amounted to little more than trembles and small motions in his hands, his arms. His head was what responded the most, he was able to shake it from side to side several times. He wasn’t sure what he was able to say, what his dysfunctional vocal chords managed to produce, but in his mind, Dean was shouting, screaming. “No! It’s all some damned trick! You aren’t my father, John Winchester is dead! This is all a lie, all a trick! My dad is dead, _you’re dead!”_

Warm hands were on both of his shoulders now, a calm counterpoint to the wild bleeping from the monitors. Dean could hear John trying to soothe him, sounding frightened and desperate - another mistake, monster, his dad _never_ sounded like that - but there was hardly any need to calm him. His fit of temper, as small and ineffectual as it was, had totally exhausted what little reserve of energy he had. What the _hell_ was wrong with him?

“Dean, it’s okay now, we’re fine, we’re safe, it’s okay,” the John-thing kept repeating over and over, as well as telling him to calm down, he shouldn’t overexcite himself. When he saw Dean was calming - though not by choice - his broken attempts at shouts coming to nothing but equally broken pants, he stared steadily into Dean’s eyes. 

“It’s alright, Dean,” he said, low and clear. “We’re safe now. You and I got out just fine.”

Dean frowned. He couldn’t speak any more, his brief fit had completely drained him, but he was able to mouth, “What?”

The John-thing read the word and again licked his lips. “There was a fire, son. You remember the fire at the house? You got hurt pretty bad and… You’ve been asleep, Dean. In a coma. You’re all grown up now, but you’ve been in a coma since you were four.” His eyes looked like they were brimming again as he stared down at Dean, telling him impossible things. “You’ve been asleep for thirty years, Dean.”

Dean stared. He had the terrible feeling that if he had been able to, he would have laughed. In the mire of his thoughts, only one came through clearly. “Where’s Sammy?”

The John-thing watched Dean’s mouth and paled. Dean felt like screaming.

“Dean… Sammy is dead. I’m so sorry.”

He’d thought he would be able to handle whatever lies he was told. He thought he could keep himself under control. He thought he was too exhausted to manage anything more.

He’d been wrong.


	2. Chapter 2

Hell was a place Dean had no desire to revisit, ever. He’d spent forty years of his afterlife in the stench of the Pit, longer than his own lifetime. Thirty of them had been spent on the rack, tortured to nothingness again and again, and ten of them spent feeling himself twist into one of the demons he’d once hunted. 

Forty years had been more than enough. 

But even after being pulled out of Hell by the ‘grace of God’ and one skinny angel, he hadn’t been able to leave Hell completely behind. It was in his mind, squatting like a toad, ready to torture him all over again with dreams, memories and doubts. Saved, but not _safe._ There were times when Dean had wondered if he would ever know a day without at least one black memory fouling his thoughts. 

But Hell and all of the rot it had left on his soul was almost preferable to _this._

This place was an all new kind of Hell. It was the kind which told him lies over and over again until he actually began to believe them. Lies which insinuated themselves into his brain in little ways, undermining his attempts to keep lies and truth separate. They battered against his senses with no reprieve, with no escape for Dean in his pathetic, bed ridden body.

The nurses, doctors and specialists of the hospital, they were all in on it together, trying to convince him of this fabricated version of his life. They told him again and again that at age four his family home had caught fire. That it had all begun in his brother’s nursery. That his mother, who had fallen asleep in there with the baby had been trapped. That after his father had gotten baby Sammy out and handed him off to Dean to escape, he had stayed behind, to try and save Mary. Dean had run outside with Sammy, stopped in the yard to look back…

The blast of a back draft had blown his four year old body backwards, concussing his head soundly when he landed and patterning the whole front of his body and face with shards of glass. The blow to his head had led to complications, made only worse by later infections. He’d slipped into a persistent coma, a vegetable, for years. It was only in the last six months that he had clawed his way up into what they called ‘minimally conscious,’ which meant being able to perceive a little of the world around him: sounds, smells, temperature. No one knew why his status had changed, and no one had expected him to actually open his eyes again. 

His mother had died in her sleep of smoke inhalation. His father had nearly burned to death trying to pull her out, and had spent a good chunk of time in the hospital ICU beside his son. 

Sammy had died later the same night. The smoke and heat, the concussion from the blast and the cruel latticing of glass and wood were too much for the six month old to shake off. Dean had saved him from the fire, but not from the reapers. 

Except that it wasn’t true, none of it! It couldn’t be, and Dean refused to be taken in by their fabrications. They said themselves that waking up after thirty plus years in a coma ought to be impossible. No doubt it was to give their story more credibility, admitting up front that it was implausible rather than just expecting him to swallow it whole. He told them that he didn’t believe them, that this wasn’t his life. They just smiled and told him that after such a long time in a coma, there were bound to be some troubles adjusting. He just needed time and a chance to become reacquainted with the real world. With his father. 

With the creature that _pretended_ to be his father, Dean was the least tolerant. He wanted nothing to do with the man that didn’t involve silver, salt or holy water. Without any of his tools, though, and still confined in a body that refused to respond to any of his commands, he was reduced to just ignoring him whenever he came in, turning his face to the blank wall and covered window which beckoned and burned at the same time. The pretend John, after the first failed attempt at getting Dean to at least acknowledge him, would just talk. He’d talk on and on until a nurse poked her head in to tell him that Dean needed rest and it was time to go. As each day passed and Dean got stronger - strong enough to stay awake longer and able to speak more, but not to move much more reliably than when he’d first woken up - that time took longer and longer to come. 

Dean dreaded the visits from his ‘father.’ He would talk about the most inane subjects on the planet. His job - a car mechanic, he owned his own business now. Where he lived - an apartment not far from the hospital. His outside relationships - a string of girlfriends, the most recent of which had a daughter. On and on until Dean was ready to vomit. It was all so prosaic and _normal,_ not at all what his father, his real father had been like, and not what his life had been like. Never once in all his rambling talks were there ghosts, monsters, demons or hunting even _hinted_ at, not even when there was absolutely no staff near enough to hear. He would have thought even an imposter father would have slipped in something about the supernatural side of the world, but it never happened. He just continued with the ruse that everything was absolutely normal, nothing supernatural to see here at all, no sir. 

It was all bullshit. He’d lived an entire life out in the world, the real world, not this bland, _ordinary_ shell they were trying to fob off on him. The real world was not like this, and he had _not_ spent the last three decades in a hospital gown.

Finally Dean couldn’t take it anymore. Not the hospital, not the immobility, not the blank walls or the too bright light, the monitors, the needle pricks, the constant questions and not the damned catheters. And definitely not whatever maggot from Hell that was wearing his father’s face and trying to act like it _cared._

Halfway through one of ‘John’s’ daily visits, Dean snapped. He screamed at the imposter, now that he had the strength to do so. He told the thing to get out, never come back, to go back to whatever hole he had crawled out of. 

The thing had stared like it was shocked, which had only made Dean even angrier. Trying to look guileless, the _bastard._ He’d tried to get Dean to calm down, asking what was wrong, if he needed more rest. 

In reply, Dean had told him exactly what he thought, what he knew was going on. That it was all a deception, an illusion, and that his father was dead. Whoever the creature was meant to be, it was really only a monster, a demon or a dream. His brother was still alive somewhere, Dean just had to get out and find him. 

Not long after that, Dean met his psychiatrist. The John-thing hadn’t come back since that episode, and everyone in the hospital that had to work with Dean were all very careful around him, as though afraid to set off another fit of temper. When his shrink first came in, he thought he was just another in a long line of specialists trying to figure out why he had woken up and what was up next now that he was awake.

He was young, younger than Dean at a guess, pleasant faced and soft spoken. There was absolutely nothing threatening about him, in manner, look or attitude. From brown hair to slightly worn sneakers, he was as inoffensive as it was possible to imagine a human capable of being. 

He’d probably been chosen for Dean’s case for precisely that reason. It was probably because the hospital had a good idea of how he would respond to a psychiatrist, that he didn’t introduce himself as one up front. Once Dean found out, Eli - his shrink’s highly inoffensive name - found his job much more difficult than it had been before.

Dean didn’t offer the shrink much. There was no way of knowing who he could trust in this place, if anyone. He still had no clue what had really happened to him, how he’d wound up in a hospital ward or how long he’d been there, or what it was that had a hold of him. He didn’t know if the only monster was the one imitating his father, or everyone, or if they really were human but still enemies. He didn’t know if this was a skewed reality or complete illusion, like a djinn dream or one of Gabe’s tricks. If it was reality, he didn’t know what it was they’d done to him that turned him into such a weakling. In either case, he didn’t know what they _wanted_ or how to get out. One thing he could be reasonably sure of was that cooperating with the one asking all of the questions was probably a bad idea. 

Eli wasn’t put off by Dean’s silent tactics. When his patient went quiet, he did all of the talking himself. He told Dean about his extended stay - so far as Eli was aware of it - about what the rest of Dean’s team of specialists were doing and thinking about his condition. It was more than anyone else had done up to that point. Eli also told him about some cases that were similar to Dean’s. None were exactly alike, he hastened to assure him, as had every other person in blue scrubs or white jackets since he’d woken up, but there were many cases of people coming out of comas, and from those they had a rough idea what to expect from Dean. 

He was told, in calm, even tones what Dean might expect in the next few weeks, months and years. The fact that he had anything like muscle tone or motor control at all was because of the daily, passive exercise he’d received while in his coma. If he wanted to ever to use his arms and legs again, he would have to start attending physical therapy regularly and soon. It would be difficult and long, and in the end no one could say how effective it would be, but it was necessary. As well as the physical side, he told Dean that since he had gone into his coma at such a young age, and gone through all of his major glandular shifts while in a vegetative state, he could expect some difficulties adjusting for those as well. Mostly emotional, but there would be more. Eli was one of a few people meant to help walk him through that. Using other coma patients who had since recovered as an example, he went into more detail of what they could expect. 

Dean listened, and even though what he was being told wasn’t the most uplifting stuff, he still felt himself settle down to Eli’s steady voice. 

Then, perhaps noticing when Dean became more relaxed, he moved to a different subject - Dean’s outburst and its effects. Still speaking with his easy cadence, Eli told him how the incident had many on the hospital staff nervous, and more than one of his doctors questioning what kinds of effects the extra long coma might have had on his mind. Dean didn’t listen too closely, didn’t really care what anyone thought of his behavior. 

He never had before, so why should he now?

At that, Dean’s ears pricked up when Eli started talking about his ‘father.’

John wasn’t one of Eli’s patients, but they had spoken often enough for Eli to know a little of what was going on there. John had told him about the night of the fire, for example. How desperate he’d been to save his whole family, not able to just leave a single one of them behind even to save himself. After sending his children off to safety he had fought the flames for his wife… but been far too late. Then to discover that the sons he thought he’d saved, one had died and the other was practically dead… John, Eli said, felt that if he had just gone with his boys, he might have been able to save them both, protecting Dean from the blast and getting Sammy to help in time. But he’d failed, and lost his whole family in a single night. And now, just as one of his sons effectively came back from the dead, he called John a demon and refused to see him. 

Eli cocked his head to a side, fixing Dean with the first direct and questioning stare since he’d arrived, and asked if Dean blamed his dad for what had happened. If by calling the man a demon he was blaming him for the loss of mother and brother, which to him had all happened very recently. 

Dean had chuckled hollowly at that, and told him no. Out of all the people he blamed, his father was not one of them. When Eli pressed the issue, wanting to know why he called John what he did, all the reply Dean gave was, “Because that’s what he is. The same for all the rest of you, for all I know.”

It was far from the last time Dean saw Eli. He’d told the truth so far as being one of his regular therapists, and it was a rare day when Dean didn’t see the unassuming young man for at least a few minutes. He would talk with Dean, ask him general, innocent questions like how his day was, and usually make some small talk. Then he would ask if there was anything _he_ wanted to talk about. He never pushed, and Dean always said no, so Eli almost became a passing friend among all of the nurses and doctors. 

As for the rest of Dean’s ‘recovery,’ it consisted mostly of rehabilitation, physical therapy, the ‘re-teaching of social skills,’ and batteries of tests that left him just as exhausted as the rehab. His body was pathetically weak and thin. Every day he found something new to surprise him, some bony protuberance he hadn’t noticed before or some limitation that caught him off guard. It was slow, slow, _slow,_ and surprisingly painful to go through rehab. Every day it was like his body was sabotaging him. Once so strong and resilient, it would do anything he asked of it. Now? Now it was like being caught in a cage made out of bone and tissue, and told that it was _his_ and he had to make it work. He hated it. 

And he was still no closer to understanding what was really going on, what creatures he was up against or what their game was. He watched and listened to everything going on around him avidly, ready to leap on any clue, any hint, any _anything_ that would get him out of here, to get him to _wake up._

But it never came. If anything, the longer Dean watched and listened, the harder it became to remain firm in his own convictions. He watched the doctors and nurses, waiting for some move on their part that would give them away. He was naturally suspicious of authority figures in general, and that only worsened when they wielded needles. He waited for questionable behavior - a wrong look, a slightly off kilter move, or a suspicious comment from any of them. It never happened though. Every single one of them was unfailingly polite and helpful. There was never that sense of foreboding which he had learned to depend on, that instinct that had saved his life so often in the past, never fired up. 

With the grind of daily, unchanging routines, the smiling faces of Cate, Theo, Dr. Waters, Eli and all the rest of the therapists he’d come to know, it got harder and harder to honestly think that anything supernatural was going on. He was being worn down by the incessant normalcy. 

It was also in the little things where Dean found room to doubt himself. Small things that would trigger memories, memories not to any particular event, just…

Like the sound of an alarm going off down the hall. It was distinctive, a motion alarm for another patient who couldn’t get around on their own. There was no conscious memory of Dean’s that had that sound associated with it, yet Dean could remember it. He remembered it clearly, but the only place he had ever heard it was while he was stuck in this hospital bed. When one of the nurses on night shift came in to check on him, he could just as clearly remember the scent of her perfume. He’d smelled a lot of perfume in his day, but this was just as distinctive as the alarm, and just as unique to his experience. He only remembered the scent from _here,_ and nowhere else. 

What finally made Dean _really_ think that what people were telling him might be true, were his own memories.

The more he thought about his life, the less likely it all seemed. Really, how real could that life have been? Hunting ghosts and monsters, working with demons and angels, _dying_ so many times and always coming back… Hell, even meeting Lucifer and Death themselves? Did that really sound like real life? And when he thought of his dad and how old he’d looked… well, he would, wouldn’t he? 

When he thought back on their years of hunting, John Winchester had looked much the same as he had when Dean was four, after twenty plus years. The more Dean thought of that, the less realistic it seemed. Wasn’t it more reasonable that John would look more like the man who had come to see him than the one of his memory?

A memory that was quickly beginning to fail him.

Just as it was getting progressively more difficult to believe that the reality he had woken up into was false, it was also getting harder to hold together his memories of being a hunter. He’d tried, when he had the strength and there was no one to see him, to call Sammy. None of the numbers had worked. Beginning to panic, he’d dialed Bobby - and had to stop halfway through. He couldn’t remember Bobby’s number, one he’d had committed to memory for years. Forcing himself to breathe slowly, Dean had dug out the phone book in the little cupboard set in his bedside table, intending to look it up. Except now, he couldn’t remember Bobby’s last name.

A phone number, even one so hardwired as Bobby’s, might be possible to just forget, but his name? He couldn’t remember it. No matter how hard he tried, it wouldn’t come. 

Familiar panic taking over, Dean cast out for more memories - any and all - and turned up more and more gaps. 

When Sammy had given him his necklace one Christmas, how old had he been? The name of the first girl he had kissed was a mystery, as was the name of the girl Sammy had loved and lost in a fire like their mom. Names of people and places were fuzzy, the order of events during certain times was almost impossible to hold onto, even the details on monster lore was eluding Dean, and all the important demon exorcisms. 

He began to believe, just a little, that what they were saying was true. He’d been asleep for thirty years - his whole life - and the life he’d thought he’d lived had all been an elaborate dream. It was what Eli and the rest had all been hoping for. 

If they’d thought it would have a stabilizing effect on him, they were horribly wrong. 

Like the first chink in the wall he had erected around himself, that one, small acknowledgement of even the possibility that it could be true, the doubts he’d been holding at bay broke through and overwhelmed him. 

If this _was_ real and he’d been stuck in a hospital bed since he was four years old, then was everything he’d thought he’d known all wrong? _All_ of it? The monsters, the hunters, the ongoing war between Heaven and Hell - that was all what most people would consider impossible, and in this world it probably was. It was all a dream, imaginings in place of a real life. But then it wouldn’t just be the supernatural side of things that were different here. The people could be different, too. He’d already seen John… his father, and he was very different. 

He supposed that he was also as different as could be; not a playboy warrior and saver of the world, but a sick man who had wasted most of his life unconscious. He wondered, haltingly, if even his personality were the same as he remembered, or was that different, too?

With an unpleasant jolt Dean realized that nearly everyone he’d ever known didn’t even exist. Bobby, Jo, Ellen, Ash, Crowley, Cass… none of them were real. 

And of course, Sam. Sam was _dead._ The Sam he had known hadn’t existed, either. He’d never had a chance to grow up. It had all been in his mind. 

All of the supposed progress Dean had been making since waking abruptly collapsed in on itself. Somewhere in the back of his mind he still held on stubbornly to the hope that this was all fantasy, and that he would wake up into his terrible, horrifying, blood-soaked reality that still had everything he gave a damn about. 

But everything around him only seemed to confirm that this was the real world.

He stopped going to rehab. There was little enough point before, but now there was none. There was no point in anything anymore. 

He hated crying, but he cried for the loss of a life he’d thought he’d hated, and now missed until it physically hurt. Mostly he cried for Sammy, the little brother he hadn’t been able to save, had never once been _able_ to protect. Not once had he ever really saved Sam, but he’d still heard his father shouting in his dreams, and so that was what he had done. It was what he had always done for thirty years of sleep in attempt to make up for one failure. 

His emotional responses, which Eli had warned would be unusual, went completely haywire. Even he didn’t know what would make him laugh or scream anymore. When Eli tried to get him to talk about anything, Dean would refuse, sometimes becoming abusive to get him to leave. 

The nurses and aides got even twitchier around him. Even Cate and Theo, who from day one had been the most comfortable around him. The constant pokes, prods and condescending concern, sprinkled with advice to get up and make a new life, was all swiftly becoming too much. He even needed help in toileting and bathing. 

He just wanted to be left alone, alone to fade away and become nothing at all. It would be so much easier…

One day, when he became particularly violent with the nurse that had come to give him that day’s dose of an endless round of supplements to keep him healthy, he got his wish, if only temporarily. In the few months of rehab he’d had, he could now move his arms fairly well, even grip and lift light things. In his fury, Dean had grabbed anything within grabbing distance and thrown it at the woman who came in with a needle. She had called in more of her coworkers, and between them had pinned down his flailing limbs and administered a sedative - enough to put him under for several hours. 

To Dean, it felt like a little slice of Heaven. He got the nothingness he wanted. A blessed period of absolute peace and being unaware of who he was and what was happening around him. It was almost like the coma, but without the dreams. That, too, was a relief. He didn’t think he would be able to stand going back to that life, not if it meant he’d have to wake up from his old life to this reality again. 

When he did wake, he only wanted to go back to that silence, and considered getting himself worked up enough to be put under again. 

Sometimes he would just laugh, because there was nothing else he could do. It wasn’t funny, but it was too ridiculous to not respond to it all somehow. He was so weak, he couldn’t even fight off a bunch of nurses in scrubs. He finally had the ‘normal’ life he’d wanted so badly, and it sucked. Now he wanted his crazy, messed up, supernatural life back. At least in that life he had fit in. In that world, he had been a hero. What was he here other than a bag of bones?

Eventually he did go back to rehab, much to the relief of his ‘team,’ but not because they had all been urging him to do so. He went back because it gave him something to do, and without it he could _feel_ his body atrophy, and it made him feel sick. He had no goal in mind other than fighting off boredom and not feeling his body die around him. He knew that even if he went every single day and worked his ass off, he would never become the man he’d thought he was in his dreams. The best he could ever hope for was a reasonable amount of independence, and that was a high hope. 

Dean had no real future, which was an idea he was used to. But in his dreams, at least there he’d had a past, and a present he could really live in.

* * *

It was late, and Dean was still awake. He’d slept enough for one lifetime, and though it hadn’t happened yet, he didn’t want to risk dreaming. 

Instead of sleeping, he was sitting in his wheelchair, the place where he spent the most of his time when he wasn’t in bed. He sat in front of his window, staring out at a world drenched in shadow. His room was still as plain and stark as it had been the day he’d woken up, but the window gave him some variety. He’d worried that it would overlook a parking lot or a street and give him a view of gray concrete and cars, but that at least gave him a nice surprise. The window faced a community garden. One of those places some cities had where a neighborhood got together and pitched in for the growing of some crop or other. From what Dean could tell, it was mostly vegetables, with about half a dozen fruit trees around the edges and what looked like a patch for flowers at one end. It was quite pretty, and pleasanter to look at than a parking lot. If he looked up from the garden he would see buildings on the other side of the garden, but it was easy enough to ignore them. 

Dean had never been one for gardening, but he wanted to go down to that one badly, to dig his fingers into soil and to smell the earthy smell. Anything that felt real, that got him out of his chair and away from the sterile scent of the hospital. Impossible, of course, but he still ached for it. 

Of course, Dean could only even look at the garden at night or when it was thickly overcast. His eyes had become more accustomed to light since first waking, but they would never be what they were meant to be. Just like the rest of him. Sunlight, even the overhead lights made his eyes burn and a headache from between his brows. The lights in his room were never on, and those in therapy were turned low when he came in. Getting to and from the two places, he had to wear a pair of sunglasses to stand the glaringly bright corridors. 

Dean watched the leaves and boughs of the garden below sway in an unfelt breeze and tried not to think of anything, to leave his mind a blank. Thinking did him no good in the end. It only made the confusion worse and Eli had made it clear, repeatedly, that if Dean felt the need to talk at any time of the day or night, he would always answer his phone. But Dean never felt like chatting with Eli. Not about what occupied his thoughts: his old life. His false life. The only people he would have felt even marginally comfortable talking to about that… they had never existed. Keeping his thoughts to himself, in the end, was exactly the same as discussing it with Bobby or Sam. They were only in his mind, anyway. 

The hospital was almost deathly quiet at night, a turn of phrase he chose not to dwell on. All of the noise which couldn’t even be picked out and identified during the day, but which built and created a sort of background white noise was missing. The hallways echoed with nothing more than the footfalls of a night shift nurse or bang of a far off door. Dean’s room was on a relatively quiet wing, and at night it was easy to forget that there even was a hospital attached to it. He could easily have been in his own little world, alone, the last human alive, wishing for the garden he could see but not reach. 

So it was that when a set of footfalls came down, unhurried, to his room, Dean heard them clearly. They sounded familiar, but Dean didn’t think anything about that, nor did he turn around. He knew the footfalls of practically every nurse by now, and whoever this was, was probably checking to make sure he hadn’t fallen asleep in his chair. Several had already done that throughout the evening, and he’d learned to ignore them. 

His theory was confirmed when the footsteps paused at his open door. Looking in and seeing if he was still conscious, no doubt. Dean moved his head a little, enough to show he was awake without the nurse or aide having to ask, and waited for the sound of retreating footsteps. 

Instead--

“Hello, Dean.”

A deep voice. A voice that he recognized, which was unheard of these days, when even his own voice was strange to his ears. It sent an odd jolt through him, from the back of his neck to the pit of his stomach. 

Dean wondered for a moment if he really had fallen asleep in his chair by the window, and was dreaming the voice. While his nights were free of any lingering memories, awake was sometimes another matter, as he lost track of what was real and what wasn’t. Maybe the voice was just another part of that. 

He didn’t want to turn his head to look. It would just be acknowledging another hallucination, giving it more substance and hold on him, and he’d done enough of that already. He had to keep his tenuous grip on reality, had to hold on to it tight. There was also the fear of what might happen if he turned and no one was there. How would he stand that?

But… what if it was him? What if--

He turned his head.

If Dean had been standing, he would have fallen over. As it was, even sitting, the world tilted crazily around him. His breath came out in a rush.

Castiel. He stood there in the doorway of his room, mostly backlit - he never could resist dramatic lighting, could he? - but with enough of his features visible to be, unmistakably, Cass.

He knew it! He knew this ‘reality’ had all been a sham, that he was trapped somewhere and that his real life with Sam was still out there. Somehow Cass had found him, and they could go back, get Dean fixed up, and then hunt down whatever frigging monster that had done this to him…

Even as his heart soared, Dean began to make out details in the figure in the doorway that clashed with the image of Cass. There was no outline of a trench coat for one, and as Dean’s eyes slowly focused and made out more than mere outlines, the rest of the clothes were also wrong. Not the rumpled and creased mess of a suit lived in for far too long, but a pair of scrubs - dark blue bottoms and a lighter top, and sneakers. There was even a stethoscope in one of the cargo pockets.

It wasn’t Cass, he realized, abruptly sick to his stomach. Only another aide come to check on him while he’d allowed his mind to wander. Another waking dream.

“Dean?” the voice came again, worried and still somehow Cass’s. Dean had been quiet too long, and now the aide was concerned. He took a step into the room, coming more out of the light as he moved. 

Dean looked up again, ready to tell him that he was alright when he really wasn’t, pretty platitudes to reassure the aide so he could move on and leave Dean alone. And he stopped. He stared. The clothes were wrong, but the face - the face that light and shadow had hidden from him until he had moved away from the door… it was Cass. It was still Cass that stood there. 

“Cass?” he croaked. His voice was weak, but even if it had been as strong, Dean doubted he could have done much better. “What are you wearing?”

It wasn’t the greatest of questions to throw out. ‘What are you wearing’ was a little asinine when there were a multitude of other, more relevant questions he could have asked. But it seemed all he could really focus on was the trivial. It made things easier. 

Dean scowled, recognizing that as one Eli’s lectures, and forced himself to focus on Cass’s face.

He was frowning slightly, his head tilted in a familiar way. “I think you’re confused, Dean,” he said, and walked up to him beside the window. 

Dean was at once excited to see Cass and at the same time oddly terrified, though he couldn’t pinpoint why. It was almost as though if Cass came too near, every reality Dean had tried to keep together would shatter into pieces. But he stayed still, only watching as he came nearer, a hopeful, involuntary smile flickering on and off of his face.

Cass came around his chair, coming to the front so Dean didn’t have to strain his neck to see him, and crouched down in front of him so they were eye to eye. His face was older than Dean ever remembered seeing it before, much but not quite all of the stubble shaved away, and his hair was almost neat, like it at least knew what a comb was even if they hadn’t met in the last twelve hours. But his mouth was the same, and so were his eyes, the vivid blue eyes that always looked as though the angel were wearing specialty contacts. They were revealed in the soft light coming through the window, staring at Dean, framed by a concerned frown. 

Dean hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that color. He hadn’t known he could miss a color, but he had. It was familiar, safe, something which told him that not everything he had ever known was a lie. It was a color that meant being saved, whether he deserved it or not.

Cass’s face blurred and swam in Dean’s untrustworthy vision. 

A hand, warm and firm, touched him on the shoulder, fingers spread around the joint. A memory - what Dean _thought_ was a memory - rose in his foggy mind. A scar, red and angry, on that same shoulder. The mark left by an angel, a second chance. 

“Dean?”

He tried to make his eyes focus on the man in front of him. With a hand that still shook in its weakness he wiped at his face, as though that would help.

He ignored the dampness on his palms.

The fingers on his shoulder tightened, very slightly. “Dean, it’s alright. Everything is fine.”

Dean managed a chuckle that wasn’t hysterical, wiping at his face a final time. “That’s easy for you to say,” he admonished the angel lightly. “It’s been Hell in here. Where have you been? What took you so long, Cass?”

Cass took a second to reply. When he did, Dean felt his sense of reality take another knock. 

“My name’s not ‘Cass,’ Dean. My name is James Novak. I’m the noc shift unit supervisor.”

For a moment, Dean didn’t trust himself to look up. He was almost afraid of what he would see, either a completely different face than the one he thought he’d seen before, another hallucination, or the same one but with the wrong name. He wasn’t sure which would be worse. 

When he finally did look up, it was Cass’s face that smiled, relieved but worried at the same time. “Everyone calls me Jimmy, though,” he said.

“Jimmy,” Dean repeated blankly. He couldn’t think, his mind had ground to a halt.

Either not noticing or simply not understanding the blankness of the response, ‘Jimmy’ nodded. “That’s right. I’d heard that you had woken up while I was gone, so I came straight down to see for myself. I didn’t expect to find you, well, awake, I suppose.” He broke into another lopsided grin, embarrassed at himself.

Feeling dazed, Dean responded faintly. “Slept enough. ‘While you were gone’?”

The nurse wearing Cass’s face nodded, and removed his hand from Dean’s shoulder. Childishly, Dean wanted it and its warm weight back immediately. “A temporary transfer,” he said. “Covering for a co-worker across town. It would figure that a miracle would happen while I was gone.”

Privately, Dean thought that it sounded just about right for them, and then remembered that the ‘them’ he was thinking of had never existed. The hunter and the angel were only dreams. He had never been a hunter, and this man had never been an angel; he had only been a nurse or whatever, and Dean had been asleep his whole life.

Jimmy, if that really was his name, must have seen something of what he was thinking in his expression. His face darkened, and he tried to catch Dean’s eye with his own. “I’m forgetting, though, that this is the first time we’ve actually met. My apologies. How are you adjusting, Dean?”

Dean didn’t want to look at Jimmy, to raise his eyes from his lap where he’d let them drop. It was too weird to see Cass and to hear Cass, but for it to be someone completely different. Even though it had happened before - correction, even though he had _dreamed_ of it happening before, it was still too strange, too jarring. So he kept his eyes fixed on his fingers as they fidgeted and twisted together. He shrugged in answer to Jimmy’s question, at a loss for how he was meant to speak to him. He was acting friendly enough, but what did he really know about Dean? He was just another hospital employee, right?

…And there was still that voice at the back of his mind, the little one that grew fainter each day which he tried to ignore and yet couldn’t let go of, that wondered who this really was. Was this Cass, and he was just seeing a stranger, what this false reality wanted him to see? Or possibly this was an imposter using Cass’s face to gain Dean’s trust. But if that were true, why call himself ‘Jimmy’…?

“Okay, I guess,” he said, trying to shake off the black doubts. This was a cycle of thinking that he had been circling since he woke, and so far as he could tell it had no end. “Things are still weird and therapy sucks, but…”

“Mm,” was the neutral reply. Dean almost looked up to see what kind of expression he wore, but stopped himself. “Because I’d heard that you were having some difficulties.”

Dean winced. That had been a setup question and he had fallen straight into it. It was a very cop type thing to do, and only drove the point further home that he was talking to a _nurse,_ not his friend. 

He took a deep, steadying breath. This man was not his friend, not the one he had come to know so well over the last four years, not the one he had talked with, argued with, shared his fears with, fought with and fought _against._ This was not Castiel the angel, not even the ‘Jimmy Novak’ he had briefly known as Cass’s vessel. Dean did not know him, and he didn’t know Dean, save as a patient. The coma child, miraculously revived after thirty years. He couldn’t expect to know how this man would act, or how he would respond to his evasions. As easy as it would be to allow his voice and his face convince him that he could relax and expect only what was familiar, Dean had to think of him as what he truly was. A stranger. Possibly an enemy guised in a familiar face, whispered the internal voice, his hunter instincts. 

He tried to smile, achieved only a brief smirk. “Yeah, well, that’s to be expected, right? Guy spends his whole life asleep, wakes up to find everything he thought he knew is gone… it’s gonna mess with the mind a little, don’t cha think?”

The way Jimmy was staring at him unnerved Dean. Not just because it was unsettling to be stared at unblinkingly by someone, but because the stare was familiar. An earnest and almost unconscious stare, a subtle reminder that Cass wasn’t human, in how he would fail to recognize basic human etiquette…

Except this _wasn’t_ Cass. Whatever he was, he was not an angel.

“Undoubtedly,” the man said, still maintaining his stare. “And if there _is_ one thing that we can expect in your case, it’s that there’ll be difficulties.” He paused, still looking into Dean’s face intently, searching for some sign of… something. Possibly anything. If he were a nurse, then maybe he was looking for clues to something specific. A sallowness to his skin, how sunken his eyes and cheeks were… Dean had improved somewhat in those areas since waking, but he had thirty years of inactivity to correct for. He still looked far from healthy.

Eventually, when Dean didn’t answer him and whether or not he found anything in the study of Dean’s face, Jimmy turned away. He craned his neck to the side to look out of the window, to looking on the same view that had held Dean’s attention for the last couple hours. Dean wondered if he could actually see the garden from the angle he was at, and if he did, if he suspected what sorts of musings had accompanied Dean’s staring.

Still looking out the window, he spoke again. “I’ve heard that you’re having some trouble in adjusting to everything since waking up. All of the changes that have taken place over the years.”

Dean shrugged. Jimmy was facing away, but he thought the nurse could still see enough to catch the movement. For himself, Dean was pathetically proud of being able to do something so _active_ as shrugging. 

“I can only imagine, and not very well, what that must be like. To have known the world only four years before having it all taken away, and then to wake after so long a stretch of nothing. You’ve missed out on a lifetime of experiences, Dean, and I doubt there is anyone who would expect you to wake up feeling fine and… in tune.”

For some reason what Jimmy was saying was making Dean feel wary again. There was nothing threatening in the words themselves - if anything, they seemed designed only to comfort and calm him. The cadence was reminiscent of Eli as he attempted to reassure and lay out the world for Dean in a way that made sense. Maybe that was what made him wary. Recognizing the method of his shrink being echoed in C-- Jimmy, made him think there might be some understanding between them, a plan to get Dean off his guard.

So he remained silent, as he did with Eli, and waited for the other man to continue of his own accord.

“From the age of four you’ve had no experiences with the world. If we’d had to guess what to expect if the impossible happened and you woke up, it would be that you would still be, basically, a child of four. Your body had grown, but you cannot have grown with it.” Jimmy transferred his stare from the window and back to Dean. The intensity of it hadn’t dissipated in the least, but Dean didn’t feel as though he were being accused or attacked in any way. “Yet it seems as though you have had experiences, Dean. You don’t behave as a four-year-old newly woken up would. From every account I’ve heard, you act like a teenager or a man who _has_ had experiences, which are now being contradicted.”

Dean felt the wariness, the expectation that something horrible was about to happen be satisfied after Jimmy fell silent. It wasn’t as bad as his foreboding gave it credit for, but it was still unnerving to hear something so close to his own beliefs come from someone else. Save for his outbursts, when he threw out accusations without caring who heard them - that everyone around him were monsters, demons or worse, that his father was dead but his brother alive, that this was all a trick that he _would not_ fall for - he hadn’t shared the fact that he had dreamt up a complete life for himself with anyone. Still clinging to those hunter sensibilities that had been salvation to him before, he’d kept silent on all of that. There might be something _they_ wanted to know that he might reveal, or he might betray how very little he knew what was going on. 

If anyone so much as suspected that he’d dreamed the last thirty years, they never said so in front of him. 

Until now. 

“I _have_ had experiences,” he said, the words on his lips before he could stop them. “It’s just that… none of them were real.”

“You had dreams while you were asleep?”

“ _A_ dream,” Dean corrected, and took his turn to stare out the window. He didn’t look down at the garden, though. The garden was a small promise of reality, of _this_ reality if he could just get down to it. An anchor in a world where there were no monsters and there were no hunters. Now he was thinking of that other life he had dreamt of, and the recollection of all of its impossibilities weren’t suited to a community vegetable garden. Better to stare out instead into the surrounding city, where the electric lights fought back the darkness. Earthbound stars and the chaos of humanity seemed much more appropriate for those sorts of thoughts. 

“I see,” Jimmy said. 

Silence reigned for a time in the dim room, Jimmy apparently at a loss for what to say next and Dean far too used now to remaining silent. 

He began to wish that Jimmy would just leave. It was disconcerting to have him around while he was wearing Cass’s face, and just remaining where he was, squatted down in front of Dean’s chair was awkward. Better for Mr. Novak to move on and continue his shift, and leave Dean to his relatively peaceful reverie beside the window. 

The other man shifted, and Dean began to think that he was following his silent appeal to leave and do whatever it was noc supervisors did. He even stood up and walked around Dean to get to - he thought - the door.

Except that he didn’t leave. From behind him Dean could hear the quiet sound of sneakers on linoleum, and he waited for them to continue on and out the door. They didn’t. They stopped somewhere behind him. 

“Has anyone told you that while you were sleeping, I would sometimes come in and read to you?”

Dean pulled his eyes away from the window. Jimmy was standing beside the bed, which was still surrounded by all of the machines that he’d been hooked up to. He’d progressed enough to no longer need them, but here they sat, either unneeded elsewhere or forgotten or left in case Dean did need of them. Jimmy was looking at the bed rather than at Dean, a faint smile on his face. He looked up long enough to see Dean shake his head ‘no’ and looked down again. 

“That’s not too surprising,” he said. “I never bothered to tell anyone, so it was only the few who had seen or heard me while I was in here who know. I made no secret about it, but why make it a big deal?” He paused for a second, lost in the memory. “At first I was just looking for a quiet place where I could read, where my nurses couldn’t find me unless they _really_ looked, unless I were really needed, and not have every break interrupted. This room seemed ideal. It’s within earshot of nurses if they called for me, out of sight, private, and you never seemed to mind the company.”

“I don’t know, it didn’t seem right to sit in your room and not acknowledge you. Even under the circumstances at the time, it seemed rude. So I started to read out loud what I brought with me. Eventually I started coming here deliberately to read to you as a first priority, rather than to avoid my nurses.” He tilted his head and Dean’s heart almost stopped with the instant recognition of the gesture.

“You got so few visits from anyone. It seemed wrong to stop coming in once I started up a habit.” He shrugged. “So I didn’t. I came here for every break and read aloud. Once I finished a book at the beginning of a shift and had to resort to a Bible to finish out the day. It was a bit of a learning experience for me.” 

Jimmy trailed away at the end, and Dean was left silent. How was he meant to respond to this? Nothing he wanted to ask seemed appropriate, such as why did Jimmy choose _him_ to read to, and did he expect a thank you? Without any idea how to proceed or what was expected of him he fell back on his usual default: Silence.

Perhaps realizing himself that his chosen thread left no opening for his listener to respond, save in puzzlement, Jimmy shook himself. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope you can think of me as a friend, or at least someone with the potential to be your friend. I may only be able to imagine what it’s like to go through what you’re going through, but I imagine that it’s hard, and that you have had all too many people you don’t know at all offer you friendship and help. But there’s one thing I can offer that they can’t.”

Dean’s throat felt dry, and his voice almost failed him when he asked, “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” he said. He chuckled at Dean’s expression. “Whatever you choose to say to me, if anything at all, I’ll never repeat to anyone else. Any complaints you have, I’ll give you no advice unless you specifically ask for it. I figure you’re getting plenty of that from others. But I’m not a part of your rehab team. I’m just a supervisor of your wing, and if you want, I can be a pair of ears for you.” He smiled again. “You were good enough to listen to me for so long without comment, I think it’s about time I returned the favor.”

If Jimmy’s look had failed to make Dean feel pinned, the offer he proposed absolutely floored him. He was right that Dean had been offered friendship by any and everyone who had anything to do with him, friendship and help and advice and any number of things he didn’t want. Especially not from people he didn’t know and who were all paid, in essence, to care. He’d brushed them off, disdaining their attempts at winning him over. As though he could trust them just because they said he could. He let the attempts roll off of him and confided in no one. 

But Jimmy, who in Dean’s mind was still flickering back and forth between awkward nurse and awkward angel, this one he felt like he could - like he _should_ accept. It almost felt as though he’d accepted the offer before it was given. 

Except it was all wrong. He was being fooled by some cruel trick of familiarity into thinking he could trust this man because he resembled a dream he’d had. He _couldn’t_ trust him.

Feeling trapped by this unassuming man and his offer of friendship, Dean remained silent a long time. But if he expected his silence to compel Jimmy fill it up himself as he had before, he was disappointed. He stood, all patience, and waited for Dean.

“Thanks,” he finally said. It wasn’t a yes and it wasn’t a no, either. 

Instead of looking disappointed at the neutral answer or trying to push his friendship even more onto Dean, he smiled again. “Alright, then.” He glanced over his shoulder, to the door. “For now I think I’d best get back to it. I’m not on one of my breaks yet, and the nurses can get impatient with me. I’ll stop by again later, or tomorrow if you’d rather?”

One visit in a night was more than enough, he decided. He needed time to sort out what he thought of all of this, and what it might mean. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Jimmy agreed, and nodded. Looking back from the door, he said, “If you don’t mind my asking, what was your one dream about?”

Dozens of different ways to answer that question raced through Dean’s mind, ranging from a complete breakdown of what he’d thought had been his life, to a complete lie, to a shout for this imposter friend to mind his own business. 

He turned back to the window, deciding on a mixture of truth and brevity.

“I saved my little brother from the fire.”

The garden was barely visible out there, but Dean’s eyes were better suited to see in the dim than most. They were so sensitive to light that even the few streetlamps on this side of the building were enough to outline the rows, the swaying leaves and petals all laid out for him. He saw none of it. He saw nothing as he desperately blanked his mind of thought and memory and at the same time braced himself for the response he knew was coming. Whatever it would be, he didn’t want to hear it.

Nothing came, though, save a handful of retreating footfalls. Surprised and not entirely sure if he appreciated the abrupt exit, Dean was left to contemplate the darkened world outside, alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eli is a terrible therapist. Don’t use him as a guide for how they ought to behave. Chapter 3 up next Thursday, see you then!
> 
> [I'm on tumblr](http://ehtarwrites.tumblr.com/) if anyone wants to come say hi or chat about nerdy things! ♥


	3. Chapter 3

Jimmy Novak kept his word. He came by to visit Dean the next night. He didn’t stay long, only enough to ask how Dean was, if he needed anything and to remind him that if he did need anything later, he was a call button away. And that was it. The anxiety that Jimmy would think of these visits as a continuation of his habit while Dean was asleep - to use his room as a private sanctuary during breaks - was relieved. 

In its place was disappointment. 

The night before Jimmy had seemed in earnest, offering a hand in real friendship to him in a way that no one else had done. Without quite realizing it, Dean had allowed himself to believe that offer, even as he was eyeing it suspiciously. He’d dared to hope that in this nightmare he’d woken to, there might be one spot of hope. That in this new Hell his angel had found him again. 

And at the first opportunity to test that hope, it had fallen flat. Supervisor Novak acted the same way every other nurse and aide acted - professionally concerned and ultimately detached. All he got was the same routine every other warm body in scrubs gave him. 

It was a bitter pill that Dean nevertheless swallowed, along with all the rest that were doled out to him on a daily basis. He did his best not to think that he had hoped at all, and continued the course of therapy and rehab laid out for him. Eli still hung around, trying to get Dean to open up and talk about his feelings. One day he told the shrink, gruffly, that he wasn’t in to all that touchy feely crap, only to have him seize on the statement - the only one Dean had made that amounted to more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in days - and tried to use it as a way of starting a conversation. It had taken some time to get out of that one, and by the time he had, he’d lost what little patience he had for the man. 

Maybe it was the disappointment, but his patience for _everything_ was draining rapidly. Therapy, rehab, evaluations, tests, pokes, prods, platitudes and false smiles in a never ending parade from morning till night. He was sick to death of it all. He just wanted to go home. 

Home. Home had never been a peaceable concept for Winchesters. Over the years the Impala had become a kind of home, at least to the brothers. It was the one constant in their lives beyond terror and blood, the place they could go to and go with, a roof over their heads that had the advantage of also having wheels to take them away when they needed it. Motels were never home, towns were transitory at best, places to work a job and then leave before welcomes became warrants. As a child home had been the house in Kansas, with a mother and father and neighbors who borrowed eggs. It hadn’t lasted long, but it was the first home Dean had known. 

And the only one, in this reality. Thinking about it, he realized that the Impala, his baby, didn’t actually exist. He had never driven in it, never worked on its engine, never totaled it and built it again from the tires up. His heart ached all over again. The only home he had ever really known had been the house. 

He had no home to go back to, no car to act as his shelter and take him away from this place. 

He really was Dorothy, he thought to himself one evening, and the tornado had taken everything. When he woke there was nothing but miles and miles of desolation. 

As though to underline his dark thoughts, it wasn’t long after his revelation that Eli reminded him that he still had a father. One who still wanted to see him but couldn’t unless Dean allowed it. 

It was too much, and for the first time in over a week he had another ‘outburst.’ He screamed obscenities at Eli, poor little polite Eli, who really had so very little to do with Dean’s current frustrations, but who was the nearest one to hand when the frayed thread of patience and reason snapped. He screamed, he threw whatever he could reach, he even tried to get up out of his chair, and when that led to his collapsing to the floor in his weakness he had lashed out at anyone who came near to help him.

Another needle stab, an almost familiar, tidal rush around his ears and in his blood, and the world crumbled away, dropping Dean into black, dreamless unconsciousness. 

He didn’t know how long he slept this time. If when he slowly clawed his way back to wakefulness, he’d find that he had slept for hours or days. Secretly he wished for years, and this time for the world to make sense when he woke up. He shifted in half-sleep, touched his own face with fingers that were too soft and too thin. 

When had he ever thought of his hunter life as something that made sense?

“Hello, Dean.”

He didn’t jump. It had become so familiar that even unexpected it was hard to be surprised. The brief, insane thought that yes, this time it was Cass, he had broken through the walls of whatever illusion had caught him and now everything would be getting back to their special brand of normal, was, in fact, very brief. It flashed through Dean’s mind like lightning and was just as quickly gone. 

This wasn’t Cass. This wasn’t even a friend.

Carefully, Dean opened his eyes. The room was dark, the kind of dark that was only possible after the sun went down and no light could sneak in through window and drapes. That told him the minimum number of hours he’d been out, then. It’d still been daylight when he’d snapped at Eli. No machines were attached to him this time, no glowing graphs or rhythmic beeps following along with his heart and breathing. The room was quiet, and in the dreamlike logic of those just waking, the lack of machinery confirming that he was alive made Dean wonder if that meant he was dead. He’d been dead so many times that the thought of it now wasn’t even enough to cause a blip on his EKG, if he’d had one. 

Eventually, his wandering eye tracked down the source of the voice that had greeted him. 

“Cass,” he gasped, and coughed. 

The figure beside him reached out a hand as though to help. “Dean. Are you alright?”

Something in the way the question was asked made the Hell-reality snap more solidly into place. He looked over again, squinting through the dark and his bout of coughing. 

A concerned face was watching him with vivid blue eyes. The brows were drawn close to each other, the lips slightly parted, and the dark hair was more rumpled than Dean was used to seeing it these days, but which was far more familiar to him than when it was combed. He even thought he could detect a darker than average shadow of stubble across cheeks and chin. He was in a chair beside Dean’s bed, a tan overcoat across his shoulders and open-- Dean blinked, and looked again. It wasn’t an overcoat, he slowly realized, but something more like a lab coat, white, worn over his scrubs. In the dark and with scraps of sleep still in his eyes, it was an easy mistake, but no. It was a lab coat. It was Jimmy sitting beside him. 

Dean drew in a couple deep breaths, a way to help get him back to reality, more awake and less dreaming. “I’m fine,” he said, the everyday lie coming easily to his lips. 

Even in the dark, he could see that Jimmy didn’t believe him. “Is that right?”

Dean began to nod, and then noticed that Jimmy had lain a hand on his left shoulder. The same shoulder he’d touched the first night he’d come to see him. The same shoulder that had once borne the vivid red print of an angel’s palm and fingers…

Dean shook the hand off before he had time to think about it, before he could wonder if he wanted the warmth seeping into his flesh or if it burned him with false memories.

Jimmy didn’t seem surprised or insulted by the rejection. He merely took his hand back, letting it fall into his lap and scrutinized Dean’s face. Dean shut his eyes to it, the memories which told him that being so closely studied by this face was familiar. 

“I hate this place,” he muttered to the complete darkness behind his eyelids. 

In the silence of a small room, Jimmy heard the remark. “I don’t blame you. I hate it here sometimes, and I only work here.”

Dean kept his eyes closed, and seriously considered keeping his mouth closed, too. Weeks ago Jimmy had made the offer of being an ear for whatever Dean wanted to say and he had never taken him up on that offer. Every evening Jimmy stopped by to see how he was doing, and Dean had never stopped him before he left again. It was all so pointless. Nothing would change just by talking about it, so why bother? As with Eli, Theo, Cate and anyone else who could be said to be ‘near’ him, Dean found a measure of self-defense in silence. In silence there was no way for anyone to know what was going on in his head, no way for anyone to pick it apart and strip away the last few tattered remnants of his old life. The life that had never been.

But the words had been building up in him too long. He had to talk to someone, or he would lash out again and again, until they decided to put him under restraints. His defensive silence was choking him. Of all the people in the hospital, Jimmy’s was the nearest to a friendly face he had seen. Even if the man behind the face was the wrong one. 

With eyes still shut to filter out the inconsistencies of the man next to him, Dean grunted. “At least you can leave any time you want.”

There was the sound of shifting before Jimmy answered. “I wouldn’t be quite so certain of that, really.”

“You can walk,” Dean snarled. “You have a life and a home and options. If you really hated it here you could just pick up and go. Anywhere you wanted.”

“Sounds like something you’ve thought a lot about.”

_Sounds like something I’ve done all my life,_ Dean thought to himself. That thought was too much to put into words, though, and he kept it to himself. Instead, he went with enmity. “What are you doing here, reading to me again?”

“It’s a little dark for that,” Jimmy said with what sounded like a smile. “No, I just came in to see how you were doing is all. And stayed for a while. ‘Holding vigil’ I think it’s called. guarding someone or something through the night.”

“From what?”

“Who knows? Monsters and demons, probably. It’s a very old tradition.”

Dean winced. It would figure. “Did any show up?”

“What, monsters?”

“Yeah.”

“Only Pat the janitor, and he only tries to look like one.”

“Would you know how to deal with a monster if one showed up?”

There was a pause. In his mind he could see two different potential expressions pass over Jimmy’s face. One would be almost pitying, a look that said Dean was an idiot, because of course he would know how to deal with any monsters stupid enough to face him. The other, and the much more likely one, was an expression of puzzlement, shaded with the caution one had when they realized, at last, that they were sharing a room with a madman.

“No,” came the eventual reply. There was a little caution there, but Dean thought he could also hear some curiosity. “Do you know how to deal with monsters?”

“Yes.” The word was out before Dean had a chance to think of how crazy it would sound, before he could weigh the risk of opening the door leading into his dream life. The silence was broken, it would take more than caution to stop him now. “You kill them before they kill you.”

“Seems simple enough when you put it like that.”

“It’s not,” he said, cutting off the levity in the other’s voice. “There’s all kinds of nasty out there. They all come with different instructions for how to turn them off, and they ain’t exactly holding still while you’re doing it.”

“I would imagine not.” Dean heard him shift in the hospital chair again. Dean wondered if he would get up and leave now that he knew his patient was awake and physically fine. If he would take the opportunity to get away from the lunatic ravings as quickly as possible, or if he would stay and ask how you killed monsters. He remained quiet, not with the intention to quit speaking, but to see which way the noc supervisor would go.

“I heard about this afternoon,” he said, and Dean’s line of thinking came to a crashing halt. “About the incident with your therapist and what preceded it… Do you think you’re calm enough to talk about it?”

He thought about it. He honestly didn’t know if he was ‘calm enough’ to talk about anything without running the risk of lashing out at whomever he was talking to. The red rages that overtook him had a warning which came only a few seconds before the eruption itself. He was never sure what might set them off or if he was near to having one. Having just woken from the consequences of one rage it ought to be reasonably safe, but he didn’t _know._ How could he, when he didn’t know which way Jimmy intended to take the conversation?

“Maybe,” he conceded.

There was the sound of a deep breath, as though it had been held a long time and finally released at Dean’s word. 

“You’ve become something of a legend around here, you know.” Thankfully it wasn’t a statement Dean was meant to answer, as he had no idea how to. “Even before you woke up, you were known throughout the facility. Then, when you _did_ wake up, your notoriety only increased. By quite a lot, actually. People can’t stop talking about you, can’t stop speculating. We keep the majority of the morbidly curious at bay, but it’s true. People want to know about you. And in place like this, privacy laws notwithstanding, news gets around fast. Grapevines have nothing on gossip when it comes to the medical field.” 

Lying in bed, Dean wondered what any of this had to do with his fit of temper with Eli that afternoon.

“People are curious, they find ways to learn everything they can about you. The nature of gossip is such that even if you’re not looking for it, you can still become privy to it. It’s pretty well known that your father isn’t welcome to see you, and if it’s not well known yet that today’s incident had something to do with him, it will be soon. What isn’t well known, and what everyone wants to know, is why your father is so unwelcome.”

“… Does everyone include you?”

“I’m curious, but I won’t pry. Just be aware, since it’s obviously a sensitive subject that others might pluck up the courage to ask. You should be prepared for that.”

Dean wanted to laugh, but had the horrible suspicion that if he did he wouldn’t be able to stop again without the intervention of a wall against his skull. Better and better. Not only was he helpless, stuck in a reality that hated him and without his nearest and dearest, but apparently he was a sideshow freak as well. 

He rubbed at his face, the rough stubble of a day’s worth of beard grating against his palm and setting off a wave of déjà vu - sitting in a hospital, Cass close at hand, the need to get away pressing at his back. 

There was nowhere to go, and even if there was, there was no way to get there. 

“I hate this place,” he repeated in a mutter. “I hate being stuck here. I hate being so pathetic. I hate being awake.”

There was a long minute of silence. If Jimmy chose not to answer at all then Dean wouldn’t be able to fault him for it. If he also chose to leave, Dean doubted that he would be able to do more than resent it after being offered friendship. But even so, if he put himself in Jimmy’s place, he couldn’t say that he would do any better. 

Jimmy, whatever his thoughts might have been, did not leave. After a long minute and a few of its fellows, he replied quietly. “That’s a lot to hate, all at once. I think I can understand most of them, though.”

Dean didn’t reply. There was nothing he could think to say that wasn’t aggressive or childishly petulant, and he was tired. Too tired to fight much more. 

In the darkness that wasn’t behind Dean’s eyelids, he heard Jimmy shift again. He wondered if the man was more uncomfortable physically or mentally to have him wiggle so much. He was a little envious. Dean felt like he shouldn’t move at all. “You hate being awake…” he started, and then stopped, sounding unsure of himself. When he began again, that uncertainty was only more plain. “You said before that you had dreamt of saving your baby brother… Do you still dream about that?”

“No,” Dean said truthfully. That perhaps was the one greatest blessing of this new nightmare life. Asleep, there was nothing, no dreams either good or bad. Maybe after thirty years of nothing but dreaming, he had simply run out. 

“I did hear about what happened with the fire… Like I said, in places like this, even if you’re not actively looking for information, it can find you. But it sounds as though you remember it happening differently. Do you… would you mind telling me how you remember that night?”

“Why the hell would you want to know that? It never happened. My brother died.”

“Maybe so.” Jimmy sighed. He sounded tired, too, and sad. “But the reality of what happened is so unforgiving. What you experienced, true or not, seems like so much better of an option than what the truth is.”

Again, Dean felt like laughing. If this man had any notion of what the rest of Dean’s dreams entailed, he wouldn’t be calling it the better option. With the hordes of darkness lying in wait, sometimes jostling each other to feast on the smorgasbord that was humanity, he doubted anyone seeing that would think it the better option, whatever the alternative was.

The idea of talking about his false life made Dean’s palms itch, but the need to speak, to speak about _anything_ was overwhelming his few remaining misgivings.

_Besides,_ whispered the faint voice within, the one that still insisted from time to time that all of this was some trick, some ploy… 

_Besides, this is Cass. Cass is one you can trust._

_Except for those times I can’t,_ he thought back at himself rebelliously. Even as he thought it, though, he knew it wouldn’t change what he would do. No matter how many times he was betrayed by the angel, he still trusted him. It’s what made him family. He took a deep breath, and he began to tell the tale of a life that had never happened.

* * *

It didn’t all come out in one night. Despite Dean’s pent up need to talk to someone, he couldn’t bring himself to let it spill out of him all at once. He told Jimmy about running out of the house, about his father shielding the two of them, and the three of them surviving and living together for many years after that. Because he seemed interested in those parts that were uplifting and full of hope, Dean told Jimmy about Sammy. How he’d grown up to be incredibly smart, independent and kinda nerdy, how he had gone off to college and pre-law, how he wanted to be a lawyer and had a girlfriend everyone was sure he would marry… He told Jimmy all of this while carefully tip-toeing around certain little details like their family never having a permanent home, living out of an Impala, their father’s obsessive preoccupation with avenging their mother, the rift between Sammy and said father, and anything to do with ghosts, monsters or demons. If Jimmy noticed that there were gaps, he didn’t say anything about it. 

As little as it was, relating that much relieved a lot of the pressure. The more Dean talked, the less compulsion he felt to continue. By the time he got to Sammy’s impending interview and how proud he had been of his little brother, the compulsion had worn off completely. The pressure of words had finally been relieved, and now he was tired, ready for a natural sleep.

Jimmy, who had remained silent throughout the entire story save for one or two small comments, didn’t press him for more when he saw that Dean was winding down. They talked a few minutes more, Dean couldn’t recall about what exactly, his mind was echoing too much with excavated memories. Then Jimmy left, saying goodnight and giving the usual reminder about call buttons. 

That night Dean slept better than he had done for weeks. When he woke, he felt like he could face his physical therapy with a minimum of kicking.

When evening rolled around, Jimmy came by as he always did. The pressure to speak hadn’t had a chance to build up again, but they still talked a little. About therapy, rehab, the crappy cafeteria food - all things that were safe, unlikely to upset or open up cans of worms. When Jimmy left, Dean went to sleep.

It was a new routine, and after the third evening, Dean realized that it was very similar to the one they’d had before. The only real difference was that now Dean was responding to Jimmy’s presence with more than a grunt and ‘yes’ or ‘no’ replies. It wasn’t that Jimmy was suddenly more attentive, it was that Dean was more responsive. 

The realization didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would, or as much as he thought it should. He was being more open with someone on the hospital staff, with _anyone_ who might be an enemy in disguise. True, he was still veiling what he said, but the change was still very much there, and hinted where it was likely to go if the trend continued. 

Still, he couldn’t force himself to worry very much about it. He was talking with Cass, after all. Except that he wasn’t. Dean knew that, but he couldn’t convince himself to believe it. 

In a way the confusion during the day only grew worse. Knowing exactly where he was or what was going on became something of a minute by minute gamble. Sometimes during his PT he was certain that he was there to recover from injuries he’d gotten in battle with demons, that when he recovered and got out he would be back on the job, that the Impala and Sammy were waiting for him. During those moments, though he believed once again that the world was full of danger and that most of it was gunning for him, he felt more comfortable and secure in his own skin than when he knew otherwise. Then the moment would pass, reality would roll over him, and the safe world around him would try to smother him with its bleakness. 

Somehow, each evening Jimmy was on shift and he would utter the so familiar “Hello, Dean,” all of that would go away, and Dean felt sure of where he stood again. 

It would only be a matter of time before Dean began to tell him more about his dreams, more than just Sammy.

It was a slow progression, one achieved over weeks of Jimmy’s evening visits. He began with hints at their less than Utopian lifestyle, relating John Winchester’s obsessive tendencies, how it led to their state as drifters and all of the family tensions that resulted from it. It was a slow process, hindered by Dean’s continuing reluctance to mention anything to do with the supernatural. Maybe it was vestigial hunter instincts, maybe it was that he didn’t want C-- Jimmy to look at him as though he had gone completely insane. Whatever it was, he carefully excised those parts, and it all worked rather well. 

He hadn’t planned on letting that proverbial cat out of the bag when he did. 

“I don’t like relying on others to do anything for me, let alone _everything,_ ” he’d said in response to a question about why it was he hated the hospital so much. “It’s like I’m helpless or something, and I am not helpless. I’ve saved how many lives, and now--“

He’d stopped, realizing what he’d said a moment after saying it. Jimmy’s eyes had sharpened on him, and he knew that there was no way he would ever convince the man that he hadn’t heard what he had. Now or weeks from now it would come up, and Dean would feel like he would have to answer. 

Maybe it hadn’t been a slip of the tongue after all, he thought later. Maybe it was a subconscious attempt to get everything out into the open. And maybe he’d spent too much time around Eli, if this was how he was thinking now. 

Gradually, even more of Dean’s life came out for Jimmy to hear, always in small enough pieces so Dean was never too afraid of the nurse choking on what he had to say. Slowly enough so he never had to worry about overwhelming him with just how crazy it all sounded. It was beginning to sound crazy to Dean, who had lived through it all, and in a way that terrified him, that what had once been his life was starting to feel unreal to him. What if one day he woke up and realized that he could no longer recall what the steering wheel of the Impala felt like under his fingers, or the rumbling song of the engine? What if one of these days he managed to make it to the mirror and he couldn’t place where he had always recognized some of Sammy’s features in his face? The smell of his jacket, the endless feel of driving into a night full of stars, the thrill of putting down some baddy, his own body responding like a well honed weapon… What would he do if he lost all of that?

Of course, it was already starting, though he tried to convince himself that it wasn’t. Names were escaping him in ones and twos, some fading away to come back into focus again, only to disappear a second time. He remembered for example that Bobby’s last name was Singer, but he didn’t know how long he would hold on to that name. It was frightening to watch things that had been so important erode, things he had been convinced he would never, ever forget, even if he were locked in Hell for another forty years. 

What had been the name of the demon that had tortured him for so many of those years…?

So, maybe that was another reason why he had finally cracked and decided to tell someone about his life that never was. If he told it like a story, maybe he would remember it more. If someone else knew even a little of it, it wouldn’t be completely lost. If someone else knew the people, the events, the triumphs and the tragedies, then it might make it all more _real._

But then there was the very real worry that Jimmy would hear all there was to hear, and he would laugh, or call him crazy, or just _look_ at him in that certain way. He didn’t think he could handle being called crazy very well, to have some outside confirmation to a nagging suspicion. But he couldn’t stop his ‘confession’ now it had begun.

And Jimmy never did more than raise his eyebrows in surprise. 

Ghosts were brought in first. They were the most familiar, the easiest for someone not a hunter to accept. They were a sort of ‘gateway ghoul’ that opened the door for more and worse things to come through. Like actual ghouls. 

It was almost baffling how easily Jimmy seemed to accept it all. Nothing Dean said about the monsters themselves, how to gank them or the overarching thread of the tale - _why_ the Winchester family were hunting these things down - fazed him at all. 

When he felt that Jimmy was about as prepped as he was ever going to get, Dean started over from the beginning for a third time, this time not leaving a thing out, starting from the night of the fire and the shadowy figure he had seen in the window of the nursery as he held his baby brother close. 

The third telling was at once the easiest and the most difficult. It was easy because it was complete for the first time, with no need to improvise edits and workarounds as he went. At the same time, because it was the truth of all he had experienced, it was like living through it all again. The early years of travelling around the country, changing schools nearly as often as socks, the weapons and lore training, taking care of Sammy and trying so hard to give him those little moments when he could be completely normal, the fighting, the rift that opened between Sammy and their father and what it really meant, and then closing in on the Yellow-Eyed Demon, bringing Sammy back into the life to finish it all… 

Dean told it all, leaving out as little as possible and knowing that he still managed to miss plenty that could have been said, if he could only remember it all. He told it from beginning to end, as it happened, not even sparing himself when it came to how much he had screwed up and failed, over and over again. The only concession to discretion he made was when they came to the angels - to Castiel. When he came into the picture, Dean was careful to only refer to him as Castiel, never Cass. Jimmy didn’t comment on him any more than anything else, so it was probably safe. He failed to make the connection between ‘Castiel’ and ‘Cass,’ a name he had called Jimmy more than once. 

“I was wrong before,” he said once. “But _now_ I think I understand why it is that you hate this place so much. Here you’re stuck in a bed or a chair. There, where you had been your whole life, you had been strong, able to change the fate of the entire world. Whether it was falling apart or not, you had a family, and you had control. You got to be a superhero in your dreams.’

Dean had given that assessment a lot of thought after Jimmy left. He wondered if Jimmy’s observation was true, or if it was just a trick of perception, like what had happened with those novel freaks he and Sammy had run across once upon a time. It had certainly never felt like he had been in control at the time. The only kind of change he’d managed to cause for the world seemed to be to make it go from bad to worse. That sure didn’t sound like a superhero to him. 

Eventually he decided that Jimmy was full of shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter up next Thursady, see you then! 
> 
> [I'm on tumblr](http://ehtarwrites.tumblr.com/) if anyone wants to come say hi or chat about nerdy things! ♥


	4. Chapter 4

Over the weeks, Dean had gotten to know Jimmy’s schedule pretty well. He knew within a tolerable margin for error, which days he could expect to see him and at about what time. Generally it was easier to know what time to expect him than what day. Work rotas for the nurses - even the supervisors - seemed to be something that they played by ear, and what was set in stone one day could be chipped away the next. Whereas Jimmy’s personal, hour-by-hour schedule was a little more predictable. With very little variation that Dean ever saw, once the man was on the clock he stuck to the same routine. 

He would get in at 9:30 or 10, do whatever was needed for the shift change, and then begin his rounds at around 11. Dean’s room, which was at that far end of a hall, was practically the last place he would stop, so Dean could expect to see Jimmy the first time during the night around 11:30.

When midnight came and went with no sign of him, Dean assumed that it was one of his nights off. He’d been expecting him since Jimmy had just finished out his regular weekend - as far as such things were ever regular - but he wasn’t too disappointed. He hadn’t been waiting up especially for the supervisor’s usual visit.

According to the slew of doctors and specialists that had been assigned to him, the unprecedented length of his coma had seriously messed with his hormone balances. One of those that had been put out of whack was melatonin, one of the heavy hitters meant to regulate sleep. They were doing their best to get his body to rebalance, but nothing seemed to be working very well. Personally, Dean came to think of it as having spent too much time as a hunter, up at all hours and sometimes going without sleep for days. He just wasn’t built to sleep at night anymore. Night was for prowling and hunting. Or, more recently, reflecting. 

Dean wasn’t really built for reflecting, but with nothing else to do and the television providing only what made blank walls look interesting by contrast, he didn’t have much choice. Though to be honest, most of his ‘reflecting’ consisted of simply letting his mind drift wherever it wanted to go. If he let it wander long and wide enough, he could come back to himself with absolutely no recollection of what he had been thinking about. It was almost as good as sleep.

So it was like being startled awake when the familiar call of “Hello, Dean,” came from behind him. 

Dean jumped, swinging from the window where he had been utterly failing to see anything outside of it, to the jackass would-be angel that had snuck up behind him. Unlike the memories of similar instances that had happened over the last five or six years, the face he was met with wore a faint smile. It could have been more disconcerting than the blank expression he was used to seeing, but there was no malice, just honest amusement. 

Before he could say anything, either a reprimand or a quip, he hadn’t decided which to go with, Jimmy said, “How would you like to get out of here?”

Dean’s mind went blank, and then just as quickly was crowded with competing interpretations for what he’d just heard. ‘Out of here’ as in out of this room, this hospital or this reality? Was this just a new way of asking how he was, was Jimmy being serious, or was he being a smartass?

For a second, all of the half formed notions he still clung to that this all might be an illusion or trap, and that it was only a matter of time before Sam or Cass broke though it to rescue him, all seemed validated. Cass was sending a message through this creature that looked and sounded like him, a message that there was a way out, and if Dean could just find it, he could take it. 

Then, as it was bound to, the current reality reasserted itself, making it clear in tiny ways that the leap of Dean’s heart and the quickening of his pulse was completely uncalled for. All of the rekindled hope was dowsed before it could catch alight. 

Dean smiled up at Jimmy. “Is that a trick question?”

The supervisor shook his head, unaware of all that had flashed through Dean’s head in the space of three seconds, of the bitter disappointment it was becoming second nature to hide. His smile never wavered, intense blue eyes bright even in the dim light. “Nope, no trick. What say you and I go for a walk about?”

Dean pulled a face. “I’ve already had my exercise for the day, thanks. And if you mean a walk as in I sit and you push me up and down the halls, I’ll pass on that as well. The lights are dimmer at night, but the view is the same.”

The smile still didn’t falter. Dean tried to hate it, but couldn’t. “No, I had _that_ more in mind.”

On ‘that’ Jimmy nodded, indicating the view outside the window that had been failing to engage Dean’s attention. He looked out the window, following the gesture automatically. 

He had been awake for what felt like a year, but which was only a few months, and he had yet to go outside. His sensitivity to light was too acute to consider it, even if it were overcast and he was wearing his shades. He wore them inside, for gods’ sakes, there was no way he would be able to handle sunlight. It was just a given that going outside wasn’t an option for Dean. 

This was the first time anyone had suggested going out at night. 

“Isn’t… isn’t that dangerous? For me, I mean, what with…?” He motioned to himself to indicate just how thin and weak he still was, attempting to communicate without actually having to say the words just how vulnerable he was to something like the night air.

Jimmy just shrugged. “It’s a warm night. It’s July, so it’s about as warm as it will get before it becomes unpleasant. Besides, you’ve gotten stronger. Strong enough to handle a walk, and I think you’ve been spending far too much time in a single room.”

Dean was about to point out that he did, in fact, go to other rooms for his various forms of therapy, but Jimmy already knew that. It wasn’t what he meant, anyway. He meant he had been in the hospital as a whole too long…

He opened his mouth a second time, an excuse not to go forming on his tongue, but closed it again before the excuse could be voiced. He wanted to go outside. Why was he trying to think of some plausible reason not to go? After staring out of his window at the community garden for weeks someone was finally providing him the opportunity to actually go down, possibly into the garden itself. Moreover, someone was offering to get him _out of the hospital._ Temporarily, true, but he’d grown so sick of off white walls, laminate flooring and the wrought iron cross on his wall that any sort of escape was a welcome one. 

And he was trying to think of a way out of it. Why?

“You’re right,” he said before he could think of one. “Lead the way.”

Dean got himself turned around, juggling the wheels around the bed frame with relative ease and, as a matter of habit, picking up a jacket on his way out the door. Warm July night notwithstanding, Dean was dressed only in a tee shirt, scrub bottoms and hard soled slippers. He would have preferred jeans, but he’d never had use of them before waking up, and there had been no opportunity to get some after. With only a single, thin layer of cotton between him and the night, a jacket seemed prudent. He also grabbed his shades, slapping them over his eyes before crossing the threshold into what seemed like incredibly bright light. 

Jimmy led the way and Dean followed on his heels, pushing his wheelchair along with his arms until they burned. The physical therapists insisted he do as much on his own as possible, as often as possible to encourage the strengthening of his wasted muscles. He was managing to surprise their expectations, but it was still hard, and he tired much faster than he was comfortable with. 

When it became obvious that proceeding under his own power was more of a struggle than any real exercise, Jimmy stepped behind without a word and began pushing the chair. Dean sat back, at once relieved and humiliated, but knowing from experience that there was no help for it. For now he kept silent, allowing himself to be pushed until his arms felt rested.

Hospitals were never really completely empty, save for those that were abandoned and perfect fodder for hauntings and monster lairs. So even then, they weren’t really empty. This was a quiet wing, but there were still nurses and aides hanging around the stations or checking in rooms, and Pat the janitor, who didn’t smile the way everyone else did as they went by, but did raise a hand to them. 

The elevator deposited them on the ground floor. Dean had been to this floor a few times on his way to somewhere else, twice even passing through the lobby and the little gift shop full of expensive junk. Neither time had he stopped to appreciate the wide, close-to-the-earth view provided by the wall of windows. Both previous times had been during the day, when the light and glare had made him turn his head away. 

Now with nothing out there to shine but streetlamps, he was free to look as much as he wanted. It was actually easier to look at the windows now than anywhere else. It was dark outside, while inside the fluorescents stabbed at his eyeballs from around the edges of his sunglasses. 

This side of the building didn’t open up onto anything spectacular, or even anything as prosaically pleasing as the community garden they were intending to visit. It opened into a parking lot, around which someone had made a nominal effort to do a little landscaping to add a little green to all of the concrete. Under the halos of yellowed light cast by lamps, Dean could make out a handful of cars scattered through the lot, their bodies gleaming dully.

Without thinking, he scanned for the classic outline of the Impala. Without any real expectation of finding it, he wasn’t too disappointed when he didn’t spot it. 

The chair began to move again - why had they stopped? He hadn’t even noticed - and Dean was approaching the windows, the door, the _outside._

His heart began to pound, either in excitement or terror, he wasn’t sure. The handbrakes for the big wheels of his chair called to his fingers. It was too much, too fast. He wasn’t ready to go out there, not yet. How could he possibly be ready to go out there? Had he been outside at _all_ since he’d been a child? 

He’d been a fool. Cass-- _Jimmy_ had been a fool, as well, to think that he could possibly manage something like this out of the blue…

Dean clamped his jaw, not quite grinding his teeth, and gripped the arm rests of his chair until his knuckles ached. He _wouldn’t_ put on the brakes, he _wouldn’t_ tell Jimmy to stop and turn them around. 

The doors slid open with a hiss and Dean was hit full in the face with the late night summer air of Kansas.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but whatever it’d been had been far inferior to what he actually got. Not the stale, recycled, refrigerated and disinfected air of the hospital. This was air with body and flavor and weight. Every breath that Dean greedily sucked down seemed to revive and revitalize him. It was alive and made him feel alive to have it inside him. 

He didn’t notice that Jimmy had paused just outside the door, letting Dean adjust to the outside before continuing on until there was a little jolt as they started back up again. They followed the smooth and even walkway that hugged the side of the hospital - smooth and even, he realized, because of those who would want to take this way who were chair bound as he was. They passed window after window on one side, the harsh light from inside cutting regular swaths through the darkness. On their other side was a low verge between sidewalk and road, the occasional little arrangement of flowers or scrawny trees dotting the grass.

Dean watched it all from behind the safety of his sunglasses, but wasn’t much struck with it. What still held his attention and wonder was the living air all around them. In motion, even on the night as still as this one, it felt as though he had a breeze on his face, as though the wind were reaching out to touch him, unafraid of him in his pathetic weakness, uncaring of what he might fail to do next. 

As Jimmy pushed him along, Dean allowed his lips to part, so he could feel the air against them, could taste it on his tongue. It was heady, this feeling. It was the closest to escape and to freedom that he’d been since waking up. 

It was the closest he had been to freedom _ever,_ he realized. 

Jimmy pushed, and they rolled on, the rubber of his wheels crunching over pebbles. 

The garden was so much bigger when Dean was inside it. The fruit trees seemed enormous and almost intimidating with their full, reaching branches, weighed down with ripening fruit. The rows of carefully cultivated green were higher than Dean had realized, some of it coming up well past his knees, the heads of stalks bowing heavily under their flowers. 

Dean looked around. It was dim enough that he risked taking his sunglasses off, and was relieved when taking the shades away didn’t cause searing pain. It was a kind of relief to take them off. He hated wearing his sunglasses at night, it made him feel like some sort of 80’s poser geek, and in addition to blocking out the light around him, they sort of washed out the world. Colors were wrong, everything seemed so distant when he wore them, and he wanted the world to be close just now. 

Smells assailed him from all sides. The air that had seemed alive before practically writhed with life now. Cool air, the scent of earth, green growth, a medley of flowers and a suggestion of moisture, as though the patches had recently been watered. They might have been, before he had woken and begun watching out his window. He rarely saw people out here after dark, only the garden. 

Dean sat back in his chair, parted his lips, and _breathed._

How long had it been since he’d breathed free air? Not since he had been a child if this hell-life were true. Breathing in the smells of night and green damp, Dean cast his mind as far back as it would go, back before the fire, to a memory that he knew was real. A memory that hadn’t begun as a dream.

What he dredged up was so old it ought to have been grainy and scratched, like a piece of film that hadn’t been stored properly, or like an old family videotape that had been played too many times. It was a bit like an old family film, lemonade and all. 

They were all outside somewhere, John, Mary, four-year-old Dean and a tiny baby Sam wrapped up in a soft blue plaid blanket. Dean couldn’t remember if they were at a park or just in the yard of their house. Somewhere green and bright, with lots of grass that called out to be explored and searched for bugs. The blanket the four of them shared was soft and red, and spread with things to eat. Sandwiches and chips, lemonade and juice boxes. His dad drank beer, his mom held Sam.

He remembered looking up at his parents, John strong and gruff and still smelling faintly of grease from the shop, Mary all softness and light and warm smiles. He remembered baby Sam fussing and talking baby-talk, chubby hands reaching for anything that came close: Mary’s hair, John’s hand, Dean’s face, his milk bottle. John and Mary smiled at each other, sharing a look that Dean’s four-year-old self knew was good, but which he still interpreted as gross. It was good because it meant they weren’t fighting, but it was still gross because _ew._

That was all there was to that memory, really. Just the four of them having a picnic on a sunny day, in the dappled shade of a tree, in a place that might have been a park or might have been their front yard. There might have been talking, there probably was, but he couldn’t remember what was said. Except that something had made him laugh. He remembered laughing and making baby Sam hiccup a little when he tried to laugh back. 

Nothing important. Nothing earth shattering. But it had been his, that life before the fire. It had been shockingly normal, his real life. 

The fire had taken away family and future in a matter of minutes, left him unconscious for - literally - decades after. And in those decades--

An entire lifetime full of adventure and danger, and yes, true, a lot of it sucked in the worst possible way. But it had been a _life,_ not just a state of living. He’d been _alive,_ not stuck in a hospital bed while his body slowly wasted around him. 

In his dreams - his life that wasn’t - he’d been stuck with responsibilities, but he had never been stuck in body. Not for long, anyway. Always he had been able to pick up and move on to the next town, the next monster, the next adventure, always moving, moving, moving. The open road had been one of the few things he had never been short of then. 

Not like now, when just breathing in the air of a small community garden was close to salvation…

Dean didn’t realize that he was crying until a breeze brushed across his face and chilled the tracks left by his tears. 

_Shit._ Another sign of weakness, of how unstable and unprepared for anything more strenuous than getting to and from his therapy he was. He could _remember_ how he had been in his dreams, damn it, he could still feel the confidence, the strength of _that_ Dean. Why couldn’t he do that now, just pull those memories close and wear them as a disguise to protect him? It hadn’t been real, but did that matter when he could remember so well how it had felt? Why couldn’t he be strong now?

He tried to take a deep breath through his nose, but it had clogged up, and he sniffed. Grimacing, he breathed through his mouth and tried to stop the stupid tears as quietly as possible. He didn’t want Jimmy to see him crying, for him to know that just seeing an old vegetable garden in the dark could set him off like this. Maybe he would think his sniffle was allergies or something. 

The tears wouldn’t stop. If anything, they go worse, and Dean found that even breathing through his mouth was becoming difficult. He was just able to keep himself from breaking down in sobs. 

Humiliating. Not for the first time, he wished he could die. 

Through the white noise of crying, Dean heard the distinctive little noise of someone clearing their throat. He opened his eyes, blinking to clear his blurred vision. He could just make out, through the remains of his tears and the dark, Jimmy looking at him.

Dean’s face heated up under the steady stare. So much for his hope to keep his pathetic crying to himself. 

Jimmy was staring at him, but not with pity, like he had expected. Nor was it with that practiced, stomach-churning openness of understanding that everyone in this damned place seemed to have been schooled in until it was their default expression. No, the look on Jimmy’s face was familiar, but it wasn’t from this place. He stared at him almost blankly, but intensely, like he didn’t know what to expect, but whatever happened he wouldn’t miss a single instant of it. That frustrating, frustrating stare, with no way to tell what was going on in the head behind it. It had always gotten under Dean’s skin, that concentrated, scrutinizing look that Cass gave him. It always made him feel like there was something expected of him, or that the angel could spy something in Dean that he would really rather keep hidden. 

This wasn’t getting under his skin. The way Cass was looking at him now had a calming effect on him. Something familiar to cling to while everything else was falling apart, the one thing that felt real in this upside-down acid trip. Holding on to the long stare for sanity’s sake, Dean’s breathing slowly evened out. Cass was saving him again.

After what seemed like an hour, still without saying a thing, Jimmy held out a small handful of tissues. 

Dean almost laughed as he took the offering. It was a move that was so unlike the rogue angel that the illusion was broken. Cass was Jimmy once more, and a much better fit for the light cotton scrubs and sneakers. 

He buried his face in the handful of tissues, sopping up the wet mess of his face. It was so stupid to cry, especially over something like this. It achieved exactly nothing, save perhaps to make him look ridiculous. But then, what else was there? 

He couldn’t think of anything, but the absence of a better alternative didn’t mean he had to continue crying. Behind the shield provided by tissues, Dean calmed, cleaning his face and sniffing back any remaining tears. He had cried so much over the months since waking, it seemed a small miracle that he had any water left. He wondered if he would ever run dry. 

When he finally lowered the tissues, wadding them up into a damp ball in his fist, Jimmy was still watching him quietly. 

Dean expected him to ask if he was alright, or if he wanted to talk about it, or if he wanted to go back inside, or any number of questions that Dean wouldn’t want to answer. He was a nurse, after all, and Dean was becoming all too familiar with how they functioned. It never came. He stared for a few moments, and then stood without a word, without any kind of acknowledgement that Dean had broken down.

“Now,” he was saying as he moved back behind Dean, “we could say that these are a celebratory treat for your first venture out into the open air, but truth is we would have had them anyway. You were saying before how much you hated the food here - not that I blame you - and I thought you might like a break from the monotony. Hopefully they haven’t gotten cold…”

Confused, Dean tried to turn in his chair to see what C-- Jimmy was talking about, but he was already on his way back. There was an shy half smile on his face and a rumpled white paper bag in his hand.

Dean stared blankly for a moment, uncomprehending. Then a new smell made its way to his nose, alien in the vegetable garden, instantly making him salivate.

He must have made some kind of face, or possibly a sound - hell, he wasn’t really aware of what his body was doing anymore - because the half smile widened, showing teeth. It made Jimmy look like a little kid, that smile. He dug out a wrapper from the bag, a wrapper full of something his nose promised was greasy and delicious. He took it almost reverentially when Jimmy held it out to him. 

It’d been so long since he’d had a burger. It’d been so long since he last remembered having a burger, he corrected himself. His fingers actually trembled a little as he peeled back the paper wrapping from the deliciousness inside. He thought he might drool straight into his lap at sight of it. Sesame seed bun, red-red tomato slice, crisp wavy lettuce, thick meat patty and what looked like bacon as well. He pulled up the top bun. It was. It was a bacon cheeseburger. He thought he might faint. 

He looked up at Jimmy, who was taking out another, identical wrapper and setting aside the bag. 

“Dude,” he said, and didn’t even care about the faint catch and tremble in his voice, the remnants of his tears and new emotion. “This… this is awesome.”

Jimmy grinned at him again, pleased. “Well, don’t compliment too much before you taste it. Greasy spoon food has a tendency to vary a lot in quality.”

Dean shook his head. “No way. Just bringing this here is…” he trailed off, not sure how to express what he was feeling, how much something this simple meant to him. He didn’t know how to say that to someone like him, trapped in a hospital, in a single room, _inside his own head,_ a tiny taste of something so normal was a lifeline. It was just a cheeseburger, he _knew_ that, but it gave him tiny hold on the Dean he had believed he was. He didn’t know how to say that something as simple as a cheeseburger was like reclaiming a little piece of that man that he had thought he’d been, without sounding like a complete nutcase. 

But then, he didn’t need to explain. Jimmy just smiled and nodded, as though he understood exactly what was going through Dean’s mind. “Eat your burger, Dean. I don’t know when the next time will be when I can sneak you some outside food.”

“Oh, a rule breaker, too. I like it.”

Jimmy chuckled, settling himself to sit on the edge of a raised vegetable bed, and bit into his burger with evident relish.

Dean followed suit, and took as large a bite as was physically possible without choking himself. It was what he imagined taking a taste of heaven would be like. After months of bland or overly salty hospital food the flavors exploded across his tongue, so much so that he was sure he saw fireworks bloom behind his eyelids. It was almost enough to bring back the tears out of sheer pleasure. Dean leaned back and chewed slowly, savoring the taste of his old life. He could just about feel the hood of the Impala underneath him, Sam sitting next to him, a moment of peace between their hunts. 

When he opened his eyes again to find Jimmy the hospital nurse contentedly chewing his own burger instead of Sam, it wasn’t nearly as much of a shock as it would have been a couple months ago. It wasn’t so hard to remember that the Cass of his mind and the James Novak before his eyes were different people. There were certain things that blurred the lines between them, but once Jimmy opened his mouth there was no mistaking one for the other. 

Though, now he came to think about it, what did he really know about James Novak? What could he say that he really knew about the man who came to see him every time he was on shift, save for those similarities that were so glaring and a few vague impressions that may or may not have been recollections of Castiel’s vessel? Jimmy had been to see him so often, but Dean had heard so very little about him and his life. Somehow, it had always ended up being Dean doing the talking. Jimmy was the one person he had really spoken to, out of all of those who had been trying to get him to open up. But it had been, by and large, one sided. 

Who was Jimmy Novak? Other than nurse and supervisor for his floor - and a bit of a bleeding heart workaholic - what kind of person was he?

Finishing the bite of cheeseburger in his mouth, he blurted out the first question that came to him. “Are you married?”

Jimmy looked up, surprised, mouth full of burger and lips smeared with sauce. Any sort of dignity he’d had before popped like a soap bubble. He swallowed, wiped at his lips. “Sorry?”

Suddenly Dean felt awkward. “You know, are you married? You have someone who actually puts up with your bass ackwards schedule at home?”

The other man scoffed and shook his head. “No, no. Nobody like that.”

“Can’t find someone with a similar schedule?”

Jimmy shook his head again, more slowly this time, one side of his mouth lifting in a kind of rueful grimace. “No, the schedule has never been much of an issue. Work schedules can be changed, anyway, so it would never be a deal breaker.” He considered his burger contemplatively. “It’s always been more of a problem of personality, really. Mine, specifically.”

Dean frowned at him, which went completely unseen. “Really? You seem like you would be one of the easiest people to get along with.”

“Thanks,” he said. It didn’t sound as though he believed what Dean said at all. “Even without the stressful schedule, my attitude is what does the trick. I’m already a bit married to the job.”

Dean nodded. “Yeah, I had noticed that a little bit. So no kids or anything?”

Jimmy actually laughed. “No, no kids. Where is this coming from all of a sudden, Dean?”

He hadn’t expected to be questioned on his interest in Jimmy’s private life, and squirmed a little uncomfortably. He’d told Jimmy everything about his imagined life over the course of their talks, but so far had avoided letting it slip that the angel Castiel that appeared and made a habit of saving him was Jimmy’s double, all the way down to how the corners of his mouth would curl a little when he said anything with an ‘H’ in it. It was still a little embarrassing, and a little hard to explain how he had been more or less dreaming about Jimmy for the past five years. Even harder to explain would be how he was now checking to see just how accurate a representation his subconscious had made. He shrugged. “I don’t know, just making conversation.” He took another bite of burger, thankful for the distraction it provided. 

Once finished with his mouthful, he added, “It kinda sucks you’ve got no girl, but I really appreciate you being married to your work.”

Jimmy smiled, but again, Dean got the feeling that the expression didn’t quite match what he was actually feeling. “Well, I’m glad of that. It’s nice to be appreciated, but I hope you don’t think that you’re just ‘work’ when I come to see you.”

Dean looked at him, a little confused. “Well… I guess not? I mean, yeah, I am your work, because you’re a nurse and I’m a patient, but I guess I know that I’m not ‘just.’ I think?” The more he babbled, the more lost he felt, and he already had no idea where Jimmy was going with this. Jimmy wasn’t visiting him just because his job told him he had to? Well, why the hell else would he hang out with a wasted, emotionally unstable old ex-coma patient? Jimmy couldn’t be _that_ hard up for company.

“Good,” he was saying, sitting back a little on his narrow perch. Dean hadn’t realized he’d been leaning forward. “Because it’s true. I love my work, and I love that I can do it for a living. But I would still be doing this, helping people, even if I wasn’t getting paid for it. I was just lucky that what I love to do and what puts food on the table coincide. The people that I help are more than just a paycheck to me.”

Dean squirmed a little in his chair again, uncomfortable. This was edging along territory that he didn’t like to tread, awake or asleep. The touchy-feely yoga crap that he was sure Eli would love to dive into headfirst. He’d really rather leave it behind entirely, concentrate on his food, breathe the outside air until Jimmy decided that he’d gotten enough and took him back inside.

At the thought of going back inside his entire skin crawled, his stomach clamping around his dinner. After even so small a taste of freedom he didn’t think that he could stand going back in, surrounded and penned in by empty smiling faces, pervasive disinfectant smells and half-remembered sounds. Out here, the inside felt all the more like a prison, and trying to imagine being wheeled back in was enough to make him feel sick.

“I get that,” he murmured, almost without meaning to. When Jimmy looked up curiously, he went on. “Loving your job so much that you would do it no matter what. I get it.”

Jimmy tilted his head, and Dean was hit with yet another wave of déjà vu. “Do you?”

Dean had to pause at that. Damn it, his foundations were never as solid as he thought they were, they kept tripping him over and over again. “No, not really,” he admitted. “But I can imagine it really, _really_ well. Well enough to think that I get it, which is as close as we’re going to get.” He looked down at his burger, the next words on his tongue heavy. It seemed he wouldn’t be able to avoid a touchy-feely talk, his own mouth wouldn’t let him. 

“It… has to be hard, though,” he started, uncertain how to form the thought he wanted to express and feeling his way along. “To feel that passionately about your work, to be that dedicated to helping others… when sometimes you just can’t. When sometimes the people you want to help, they can’t _be_ helped.”

Silence met his words. For a time all Dean could hear was the soft sound of night breezes through the leaves and branches of the garden. After about a minute, Dean chanced looking up.

Jimmy was staring at him, his brows drawn low over his eyes. Even in the dark Dean thought he could make out the blue of his stare locked onto Dean, scrutinizing him with almost painful single-mindedness. Dean didn’t squirm this time. He wasn’t sure he could move if he wanted to, to be honest. He sat still and frozen while Jimmy studied him, unknown thoughts flickering behind a deep veil of blue.

It was a relief when Jimmy finally spoke, but not as much as Dean had hoped it would be. “Everyone can be helped, Dean. Not everyone _is,_ but everyone _can_ be, at least a little.”

“And if a little isn’t enough?” Dean asked, hating whichever part of him was responsible for driving these questions out of him. “If whoever it is that needs help just needs too much for you to give, for _anyone_ to give, those ones that just have to be left behind? Don’t those ones… haunt you?” As the words tumbled out of him, he realized that he was speaking out of experience - false experience, at least. He could remember those people he couldn’t save, the ones lost to death or worse, how it had torn him apart each time and the only way to salve the ache was to save twice-- three times as many people the next time, to somehow make up for those he’d failed.

Except that he never seemed to be able to make that quota. There were _always_ some he was too slow or too weak to save, and instead of balancing the scales, Dean fell further and further into debt. There was an entire queue of faces that followed him now, all of those who had died due to his incompetence or ignorance, his own personal train of ghosts following at his heels.

Even if in reality there was only one ghost trailing Dean, that was entirely too many.

Jimmy didn’t look like the type who would have a long train of ghosts dogging his heels, but you never knew, and it seemed unlikely that a nurse could go through his whole career without failing at least one patient. Dean had to wonder just where Jimmy’s personal scales were. They couldn’t be as unbalanced as Dean’s had been, but so little of that balance had to do with _numbers._ One or two or three or a dozen tokens on the side of ‘saved’ wouldn’t necessarily erase even a single failure. He knew that well enough. He wondered how steeply Jimmy’s scale was tipped, and if he was fighting so hard for him because Dean would be so heavy a token on the ‘saved’ side, helping to bring them back into balance, or because he was desperate to keep Dean from becoming one of his failures and irrevocably tipping the scales too far to be saved. 

Jimmy, whatever emotion had been kicked up by Dean’s question hidden behind his stoic mask, seemed to be giving the question serious thought. Finally he nodded. “Yes, they can. They do. You always wish that there was more that you could do, more you could give to help, to comfort, to ease their burden. You give all you can without compromising yourself, or sometimes _with_ compromising yourself, and it can still not be enough for them. And then you think it must have been your fault, that somehow what you gave wasn’t enough because you held back in some way, that you were too selfish to help them. So you resolve to give even more, to hold nothing back, so that the next time things will turn out better.” He sighed, and there was weariness and a shade of disgust in the sound. “And they do. Until even that is not enough.”

Dean stared at him, a little stunned. What he said echoed somewhere inside Dean. With just a little change of context, that could have been himself speaking about his dream life. 

“But,” Jimmy said loudly, startling him, “I don’t want you to think for one moment that you are one of those that will be left behind.” He said it with so much force that it set Dean wondering again. Who was he trying so very hard to convince, Dean or himself? 

Who had he already fought to convince to keep him from being left behind a long time ago? 

He sighed, eyes dropping to his hands and the remains of his dinner, his appetite evaporated. “Maybe I should be,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

He didn’t think that Jimmy had failed to hear what he said, but he repeated himself anyway. “Maybe I should be left behind,” he said, and motioned down at his wheelchair. “There’s no way I’m going to leave this chair, ever. Not permanently. I might, _might,_ get to where I can walk across a room with a walker, but this chair might as well be a part of me. It’s never leaving. I’ll be a cripple my whole life, and all of this,” he motioned again, this time to take in the hospital and all it contained, “isn’t going to change that. Maybe it would be best if I were left behind, and you could all focus on patients that actually have some hope.”

Dean fell silent again, a weight settling on his chest. This was something he had thought for some time, though never quite in these terms. He’d hoped that voicing it would make him feel lighter. But no, it was definitely a little harder to breathe now, his gut writhing around the food he’d just eaten. It _would_ be better if everyone just gave up on him, let him slip back into a coma - back into that sucky, horror filled life that had been all his and so full of freedom. 

Jimmy was staring at him, blank and inscrutable look firmly in place. If Dean hadn’t been so very used to it by now it would have been unsettling. It was a near thing as it was. 

“So what if you never leave that chair, Dean?”

He jumped, taken off guard by the restrained ferocity in the words Jimmy ground out. “What?”

“So what if you never leave that chair? Is that really such a terrible thing, considering all of the things that could have happened? You are alive and conscious, which is more than anyone ever expected. The fact that you might, _might,_ have to spend the rest of that life in a sitting position is not nearly enough to make us give up on you. So don’t you dare, don’t you _dare_ give up on yourself.”

He didn’t think he’d ever seen Jimmy look so angry before. It wasn’t like the anger of most men, which came out in scowls and snarls. This was more contained and came out in terse, clipped tones. He had seen Cass get angry before, and it had always set him back on his heels with the kind of transformation would come over the normally peaceable, slightly nerdy angel. 

But anger wasn’t enough to make him clam up then, and it wasn’t enough now. That was one thing, at least, that he shared with his dream self. 

“It’s not just the walking,” he argued, for some reason determined to make a point of his helplessness. “There are other things that are going to keep me from ever having a normal or useful life. Stuff even harder to fix than my legs that no kind of therapy is going to fix. Even if by some kind of miracle I walk out of this place after twenty plus years, I’m _still_ never going to have anything like a normal life. I’m _always_ going to be dependent on others, a useless burden my whole life. Not that I would call it any kind of life, any kind of future.” The pent up anger and frustration that had been building since he had woken, that occasionally broke free and had him lashing out at those around him rose up dangerously again, filling his nose and mouth with a metallic tang, hazing his vision. “It would have been better if I had just stayed asleep, just died in those dreams without ever waking up.”

The look on Jimmy’s face instantly resumed its scrutinizing, calculating gaze. His mouth turned down at the corners and he looked him over. It was a bit like being X-rayed, and Dean decided that when it came to searching looks there was very little difference between the angel and the nurse. 

When Jimmy spoke again, it was much calmer, much quieter than before, almost as though he were afraid of frightening Dean. “Do you think that because you can’t save the world, you’re useless?”

Something painful lanced through Dean’s heart at that. It wasn’t quite right, what Jimmy said, but it was close, so very close…

“That is a highly unrealistic view, Dean,” he said, still quiet. “Not to mention a bit conceited. You don’t have to save everyone to earn being saved yourself. That’s not how it works.”

“No,” Dean said, and felt the prickling of tears threatening to overwhelm him again. These tears were different, though. These prickled and burned as they rose up, trying to close his throat and choke his words. “Not _everyone,_ I don’t have to save _everyone._ Just one. And I couldn’t even do that.” Dean had to stop or risk sobbing. He bit his lip and tried to breathe, using the pain as a distraction. 

Almost in a whisper, Jimmy asked, “Sammy?”

Dean could only nod, turning his head so he faced the small arrangement of fruit trees rather than the nurse. 

Sammy. The one thing he’d heard from his father the night of the fire, the last thing he would hear from him or anyone else in over two decades was to protect his baby brother. It was a tall order for a four-year-old, just woken up and frightened, but he’d done his best. He could still remember with absurd clarity the details of that night. He could remember the fear on John’s face, how he had shouted at Dean to go when he really didn’t _need_ to shout, he could hear him just fine, why was he shouting? He could remember the odd flickering light coming from Sammy’s nursery and could even remember wondering what it was that was making it as he tried to manage baby Sammy’s weight in his arms. 

He could remember how he had desperately clutched the blanket wrapped bundle to him as he raced for the stairs, worried he would drop Sammy, worried he would crush him, worried he would jounce him too much as he ran. He could remember being torn at the stair between sprinting and edging down, not even able to see his own bare toes slapping the stairs as he went down them by feel, memory and faith. There was the struggle at the door to open it without putting Sammy down - bare feet in the grass as he jumped of the porch - his heart beating too fast and his arms aching and his eyes stinging though he didn’t know why--

Where was dad? He was supposed to be behind them, where was he? Where was mom?

Turning around, just to look, just to see-- _Where were they?_

Sammy fussing in his arms.

A bright flash, the ground rumbling and then something hot and sharp and heavy hit him and sent him flying, still holding on to Sammy, _can’t let go of Sammy--_

That, Dean knew, was the last real memory he had before clawing his way out of unconsciousness. Everything between was false, a fabrication of a child’s mind.

All those days of struggle, all the friends he had made, the people he had saved or failed, the monsters he had killed… none of it had been real. All those years of looking after his baby brother, of trying to make sure he was happy and safe, all those times he _had_ saved him… that was all a lie, too. A comforting lie he had spun for himself in his sleep, carrying out the very last thing he had heard his father say before being lost to the world. 

In his dreams he got to save his brother over and over again, when in real life, the one time it had counted, he had failed.

Jimmy said he didn’t have to earn being rescued, but that wasn’t quite the problem. He _had_ earned the right to be abandoned.

Jimmy’s voice was even more cautious than it had been before. “I won’t say that no one blames you for that, Dean,” he began, and Dean felt his heart lurch. “But I will tell you that _you_ are the _only_ one who does. _No one_ else thinks that a four-year-old boy should be held accountable for an accident, no matter what resulted from it.”

He paused, but Dean couldn’t bear to look at him. He didn’t trust his own face, twisting itself into fierce grimaces to fight back the grief. 

“I don’t expect you to believe that right away. But remember it, keep it in mind, alright? What happened to Sam was _not your fault.”_

Dean nodded. It wasn’t to agree, but to acknowledge that he had heard what Jimmy was saying. He might never believe it, but he could remember that it had been said.

The silence went on for awhile, and Dean was grateful. Better that than to have to try answering questions or hold up his end of a conversation. This way he could concentrate on getting himself under control, breathing deep and shoving everything down into the bottom of a very, very deep hole and forgetting about it. It was bad enough he’d lost the body he’d thought was his and all the skills that had been ingrained into it, but did he have to lose his repression skills as well? Where had all of his self-control gone?

It seemed like a very long time went by before Dean could breathe properly. Perhaps sensing what a struggle he was having, Jimmy remained silent and still the whole time, giving him the space he needed to gather himself together again. 

When Dean took one final, deep breath, the nurse shifted a little in his seat. Dean sensed what was coming and did his best to brace himself.

“I can understand why you would want to stay inside your dreams forever, Dean.” Jimmy’s voice was low, reminding him that yes, they were out in the open at night. “Always in danger, always too much expected of you, but at least you had your family. I can see where, compared to what you have now, that would be preferable. Who cares if you’re a vegetable and your dreams are populated with ghouls and demons, so long as your loved ones are alive and near?”

Finally able to trust his voice again, Dean forced a chuckle. “If this is your pep talk to keep me fighting the good fight, then it’s pretty awful, Jimmy.”

The nurse didn’t return the smile, but tilted his head. “It’s understandable why you would want to escape back there,” he went on as though Dean hadn’t spoken. “To get back to what is known, even if it’s horrible. Especially when there is so little that’s positive to hold you here.”

Dean studied him, curious and a little worried. A little hopeful. “Yeah…”

Those blue eyes seemed closer than ever, though neither of them had moved. “You’ve called me ‘Cass’ on more than one occasion. You nearly did again just a moment ago.”

Dean thought that Jimmy must be able to hear his heart, it was thudding so heavily. “Yeah?”

“Tell me, would ‘Cass’ be the ‘Castiel’ you’ve told me about? The angel?” 

Rather than speak, which would just lead to a third, repetitive ‘yeah,’ Dean nodded.

Jimmy mirrored the motion, looking thoughtful. “Do I look like the Castiel that you remember?”

He almost laughed. It was like a sparrow asking if it resembled another sparrow. “Yes,” he said decidedly. “You look _exactly_ alike. The only difference is the clothes. You even act a little the same. You could be twins.”

Jimmy nodded again.

_Ask me why that is,_ a little voice in the back of Dean’s mind whispered. _Ask me why it is that you and Cass look exactly the same, when Cass is supposed to be a construct of my subconscious and I’d never_ seen _you before. Ask me how that could be even remotely possible. I’ll tell you that I don’t know. And you’ll tell me, you’ll say--_

“Dean, I have to tell you something, and it may be hard to hear.”

_You’ll tell me--_

“What is it?”

_You’ll say--_

“I am _not_ Castiel.”

A small, final hope in Dean flickered out, finally succumbing to the dowsing of reality. The hammering of his heart slowed sickeningly in his chest.

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Jimmy said, seeing his crippled patient sink in disappointment. “I _am_ sorry, but I’m not an angel. I’m not the man you got to know while you were sleeping. From the way you were describing him, I almost wish I was, or at least knew him. But I’m not.”

Dean nodded, almost frantically to get Jimmy the human to stop speaking. He understood, he got it, did he have to hear anymore? “I know. I know that. You’re Jimmy Novak, nurse extraordinaire, not Cass, angel of tax accounting.”

“But I would like to become a friend like Castiel had been,” he went on carefully. When Dean gave him an incredulous look, he nodded. “I may not be that friend to you now, but I would _like_ to be.”

“What, someone who makes deals with the King of Hell because he thinks it’s best for Heaven and Earth? Or someone who intentionally keeps important stuff to himself and is barely there?”

One side of Jimmy’s mouth lifted a little. “Well, maybe a little more selective on the personal traits, then. I would like to be the kind of friend that you can trust, someone who’s got your back, your best interests at heart. Someone to talk to and share a burger with. Someone,” he reached out, tapped Dean on the forehead, making him blink, “that you would be willing to stick around for.”

Dean stared, at a loss. Too much, too much had happened, too much to think about, he couldn’t process it all. It wasn’t fair to think that he could. How could he evaluate the worth of what Jimmy was saying, how _much_ meaning was there or how honest it was when he couldn’t even really grasp what it was he was saying at all?

He nodded, bemused, knowing that something important had just been offered, something important said, but unable to grasp what it was. “Okay,” he said faintly. “Sure thing.”

Jimmy smiled. He thought Jimmy understood the turmoil going on in him, and was choosing not to comment on it or press his bid for friendship. Time would tell them if it was at all possible. For now they could wait. 

They sat out in the garden for another half hour before they were forced to go back in by Jimmy’s schedule. Dean didn’t want to, but he didn’t panic the way he thought he would when they started for the doors. On their way past in, Dean chucked the bag and the empty burger wrappers in the garbage and put his sunglasses back on. 

On the way back up to their floor, Jimmy broke the silence. “You know, I’ve been meaning to mention it to you. I think that you should think about writing down all of your dreams. As stories.”

Dean snorted. “Seriously?”

“Sure. It would give you a chance to relive it all in a healthy way. And once it’s written down you won’t forget it all,” he grinned. “Personally, I think that it would make a great story.”

Dean snorted again, and didn’t voice what he thought of Jimmy’s idea. But he thought about it, from the elevator all the way back to his room. After saying goodnight to Jimmy the idea was still turning round in his head, and when he moved to the window to look down on the garden he had just been in, the idea was still there, refusing to move. 

It was more than a little ridiculous. Write down his whole life for strangers to read about? Who would? Sure, in his dreams there had been fans of the books Chuck had written, but the thing was, that had all been in his head, as well. The likelihood of that actually working in this reality, where the color of life had been sucked out of everything, was nil. 

Still… Jimmy was right about one thing. It would give him a chance to relive his preferred life, and having it written down would solidify the memories, keep them from sliding away.

It would keep Sam from sliding away.

Moving deliberately, Dean wheeled away from the window and went searching through his drawers for paper and pen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, so anyone who's made it so far!
> 
> [I'm on tumblr](http://ehtarwrites.tumblr.com/) if anyone wants to come say hi or chat about nerdy things! ♥

**Author's Note:**

> There's four parts total to this ridiculousness, Part 2 will be up next Thursday. See you then!
> 
> Thanks for reading! [I'm on tumblr](http://ehtarwrites.tumblr.com/) if anyone wants to come say hi or chat about nerdy things! ♥


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